Memeorandum

December 30, 2015

Donald Trump asserts that Bill Clinton is a sexual predator and who can deny it?

I think the 99 44/100 percent astute Ed Morrissey goes astray here:

Whether one likes Trump or not, whether one considers him a vulgarian or not, this is a smart play. However, it might have been more effective closer to the general election. Telegraphing this punch now will reduce its effectiveness for when it might be really needed.

Well, really needed for what? Right now Trump needs to contest the Republican nomination, and I am highly confident that his supporters (and plenty of other conservatives, starting with the man in my mirror) are delighted to see any Republican give it to Hillary with both barrels. And if Trump then throws the gun at her, fine. (OK, I deplore that violent imagery. Is this really any way to ring in the New Year? Let me dial that back to a kinder, gentler "Loose the hounds!".)

As to whether airing this topic now will reduce its impact in the general election, who can say? Wild Bill's ghastly history is already old news. Hillary claiming next September that it became old news in January is hardly likely to convince anyone whose mind is not already made up. And Hillary and her supporters are likely to be airing the "Sexist! War on Women" charge in response to any and every slight, so the question of why progressives give Bill's one-man war on women a pass will be an evergreen.

December 27, 2015

Th NY Times engages in a bit of desultory Christie-bashing. Brace yourself:

Christie Spins His Version of Security Record on Trail

Geez, he may have exaggerated a few things. First politician ever.

Presumably the Times is saving their real (and invented!) dirt in case Christie re-emerges as a front runner.

Which has me waxing nostalgic. I can remember when Christie's Jersey boy tough guy persona was thought to be a likely problem out in the much nicer heartland. Whoa! In the new Age of Trump, Christie seems like a choir boy.

December 22, 2015

'I Wouldn't Keep Any School Open That Wasn't Doing A Better Than Average Job'

Math mavens will immediately wonder whether our once and future Queen was contemplating the mean, median or mode as a method of averaging. Half the schools will be below the median level by definition. As to mean and mode, that will depend on the distribution of whatever the heck we might be looking at on these hypothetical school report cards. In any case, this is all very hard to conceptualize - a Democrat threatening to close schools? Pigs will fly to algebra class first.

Well. Imagine that 90% of the schools grade at 80 and 10% grade at 50. The mean will be (no peeking!) less than 80 (77, for those who care), so 90% of schools will not be threatened with closure. Whether a wildly non-normal distribution like that is representative of reality is a question for brighter minds than mine.

And what happens in subsequent years when the low-scoring schools have been closed and the average of the surviving schools has (presumably) risen? Have the Hunger Games come to public education?

All very thought-provoking. I do hope Hillarity!'s spokespeople tell us she is serious, instead of hiding behind their pro forma "She was hitting the Nyquil again, pretty hard" excuse.

There’s good reason to think it will. Years of animal experiments have shown that an infusion of young blood in older mice can improve their cognition, physical endurance and the health of several organs. It even makes them look younger.

OK, wow. But enough Holiday cheer.

I understand that not everyone here is Irish, so the ability to quickly segue to "How badly will this go wrong?" may not come as easily. In other words, yes, I am really pessimistic about the low level of pessimism here...

So just to help any sci-fi writers out there, suppose the medical benefits of this under-30 blood in over-80 veins are real, but also much more powerful with blood relations. Ahh, well! We are either talking about grandkids or the offspring of frisky old goats defying the emerging medical CW. My guess is that, in either case, new sets of societal strains would emerge.

OK, maybe not that new a societal strain - in most of the world children have always been the primary source of retirement support for the elderly. But taking the blood of the grandkids?

What will childless couples do, pester their nieces and nephews for more quality time with their offspring? And could a parent's timeless conversational gambit - "We're not getting any younger, when might we expect some grandkids?" - get any more fraught? Maybe!

The future is coming at us like a freight train.

I DEPLORE THESE GRATUITOUS CHEAP SHOT: Sure, if this works Hillary will be the first to find out, but that means the rest of us benefit from upgraded governance right? Right?!? Waddya mean, 'more BS faster'?

The headline is baffling - exploiting fears is now a political no-no? - and shows a failure of nerve somewhere in the editorial process. Eventually we get to the real 'accusation'. Spoiler alert - its racism. First time ever, right? Just check your calendar - it will be all about sexism once Hillarity! takes over.

President Obama said in a radio interview airing on Monday that Donald J. Trump, a leading contender for the Republican presidential nomination, is exploiting the resentment and anxieties of working-class men to boost his campaign. Mr. Obama also argued that some of the scorn directed at him personally stems from the fact that he is the first African-American to hold the White House.

Demographic changes and economic stresses, including “flatlining” wages and incomes, have meant that “particularly blue-collar men have had a lot of trouble in this new economy, where they are no longer getting the same bargain that they got when they were going to a factory and able to support their families on a single paycheck,” Mr. Obama said in the interview with National Public Radio.

“You combine those things, and it means that there is going to be potential anger, frustration, fear — some of it justified, but just misdirected,” the president added. “I think somebody like Mr. Trump is taking advantage of that. That’s what he’s exploiting during the course of his campaign.”

Uh huh. Traditionally members of the opposition party run on a message of "things are great and getting better" and promise stability with more of the same. That sort of "future's so bright we need shades" campaign is what carried Mr. Hope and Change into the White House. And the same message worked for Bill Clinton, the Man from Ain't Life Grand Arkansas.

But on to the real trouble with Trump supporters:

He also described his view of the anxiety on which Mr. Trump has capitalized, arguing that some voters who voice fears about his presidency and doubts about where Mr. Obama’s loyalties lie are reacting to the fact that he is the first black president.

“If you are referring to specific strains in the Republican Party that suggest that somehow I’m different, I’m Muslim, I’m disloyal to the country, etc. — which unfortunately is pretty far out there, and gets some traction in certain pockets of the Republican Party, and that have been articulated by some of their elected officials — what I’d say there is that that’s probably pretty specific to me, and who I am and my background,” Mr. Obama told Steve Inskeep, an NPR correspondent. “In some ways, I may represent change that worries them.”

“That’s not to suggest that everybody who objects to my policies may not have perfectly good reasons for it,” the president added. He noted, as an example, that voters living in coal-dependent areas may blame him for the loss of their jobs.

Good to know the racist haters may not be totally out to lunch. To be fair, (and based on "If you are referring to specific strains" in Obama's answer) the interviewer was not going to let Obama leave until he said something along those lines - these progressives need a bit of red meat in their diet too, or did you think their smug, self-satisfied condescension can be fueled entirely by kale and cottage cheese? Sure, if Obama had any interest in acting like the President of all Americans he would have dismissed that line of inquiry, but that ship sailed years ago.

Over to Krugman for his one-time PSA that yes, importing legal and illegal unskilled workers depresses the wages of the native unskilled. Who could have guessed that increased supply reduces the market-clearing price?

Second, while immigration may have raised overall income slightly, many of the worst-off native-born Americans are hurt by immigration -- especially immigration from Mexico. Because Mexican immigrants have much less education than the average U.S. worker, they increase the supply of less-skilled labor, driving down the wages of the worst-paid Americans. The most authoritative recent study of this effect, by George Borjas and Lawrence Katz of Harvard, estimates that U.S. high school dropouts would earn as much as 8 percent more if it weren't for Mexican immigration.

Obviously liberal academics everywhere have been working double-time to reverse that result. Along with providing intellectual cover for the idea that raising the minimum wage actually increases employment, showing that bringing in more unskilled workers raises the wages of the native unskilled is a great white whale of progressive economics. But even showing the counter-intuitive result that neither minimum wage increases nor waving in unskilled workers have any impact at all on wages would be a huge win for the "reality-based".

Let's wrap this up with some good news for Obama - those unskilled white troglodytes are dying like flies anyway. Ross Douthat hasthoughts about why that might be. Obviously this would be a national crisis if it was some other group favored by progressives but if the topic was even broached in this interview, the Times didn't mention it.

“This is a serious challenge — ISIS is a virulent, nasty organization that has gained a foothold in ungoverned spaces effectively in Syria and parts of western Iraq,” Mr. Obama said, referring to attacks the group organized in Paris and apparently inspired in San Bernardino. “But it is also important for us to keep things in perspective, and this is not an organization that can destroy the United States.”

He also suggested that heavy coverage of the media-savvy extremist group by news outlets chasing viewership had contributed to the public anxiety that has dragged down his approval ratings on the issue.

“If you’ve been watching television for the last month, all you have been seeing, all you have been hearing about is these guys with masks or black flags who are potentially coming to get you,” Mr. Obama said. “And so I understand why people are concerned about it.”

Asked whether news organizations had been manipulated by the Islamic State, he added: “Look, the media is pursuing ratings. This is a legitimate news story.”

Yeah, America, have you been slacking lately? Have you frittered away your time becoming terrorized about ISIS and are no longer keeping with the Kardashians? And I hope you don't think those adorable internet kitten videos will watch themselves!

But as he begins his final year in office, those achievements have been overshadowed by Americans’ anxiety over terror attacks and the expanding battle with the Islamic State, along with a public perception that Mr. Obama is unable or unwilling to channel the nation’s fears.

Iran is in the grip of a seven-year drought that shows no sign of breaking and that, many experts believe, may be the new normal. Even a return to past rainfall levels might not be enough to head off a nationwide water crisis, since the country has already consumed 70 percent of its groundwater supplies over the past 50 years.

Always arid, Iran is facing desertification as lakes and rivers dry up and once-fertile plains become barren. According to the United Nations, Iran is home to four of the 10 most polluted cities in the world, with dust and desertification among the leading causes.

On a bit of a tangent this Times dismissal of what they call a US-Saudi "conspiracy" to keep oil prices low in order to squeeze Iran and Russia is silly. No 'conspiracy': is needed for the Saudis, a traditional low-cost swing producer, to maintain output despite falling prices and a seeming glut. Sticking it to Assad's backers is a logical Saudi strategy.

December 17, 2015

New York Times appends editor’s note to disputed San Bernardino reporting

The New York Times has attached a three-paragraph editor’s note to a front-page Sunday story on the abilities of the U.S. government to surveil the online communications of the San Bernardino, Calif., assailants, Syed Farook and Tashfeen Malik. The original story, under the headline “Visa Screening Missed an Attacker’s Zealotry on Social Media,” alleged that Malik had “talked openly on social media about her views on violent jihad.”

A jittery country paid attention. Numerous follow-ups repeated the allegations, and candidates at Tuesday night’s CNN Republican presidential debate hatcheted the government for having failed to find evidence on wide-open Web platforms.

Then, FBI Director James Comey, in a Wednesday appearance in New York City, corrected the record. He said there was “no evidence of posting on social media by either of them at that period in time and thereafter reflecting their commitment to jihad or to martyrdom,” referring to the period prior to Malik’s July 2014 entry into the United States on a K-1 fiancee visa.

Now the headline on the New York Times story reads, “U.S. Visa Process Missed San Bernardino Wife’s Online Zealotry.” And here’s the text of the editor’s note:

Editors’ Note: December 17, 2015

The original version of this article, based on accounts from law enforcement officials, reported that Tashfeen Malik had “talked openly on social media” about her support for violent jihad.

On Wednesday, however, the F.B.I. director, James B. Comey, said that online communications about jihad by Ms. Malik and her husband, Syed Rizwan Farook, involved “direct, private messages.” His remarks indicated that the comments about jihad were not made in widely accessible social media posts.

Law enforcement officials subsequently told The Times that Ms. Malik communicated with her husband in emails and private messages, and on a dating site. Ms. Malik’s comments to Mr. Farook about violent jihad were made on a messaging platform, officials said. Neither Mr. Comey nor other officials identified the specific platforms that were used. (This article and headline have been revised to reflect the new information.)

Revisions, indeed, crowd the story. None is more consequential than the lede, which formerly read like this:

...

And yes, the revisions are huge. A .pdf of the original story: ZealotryOriginal.

Barack Obama apparently met with some friendly writers, columnists and editors to whinge about nasty Republicans and an unappreciative public that just doesn't get how hard he is working on terror. [And speaking of friendly writers, what are friends for?]

Sweet jiminy.

Mr. Obama is struggling to fashion a message that reassures Americans that he is serious about battling the threat of the Islamic State while also avoiding what he considers the alarmism voiced by some Republican presidential candidates. Polls suggest that many Americans believe he is not taking the threat from the Islamic State seriously enough.

Struggling to fashion a message? Maybe the strategy (or lack thereof) is the message. Sorry, spoiler:

To counter that, Mr. Obama visited the National Counterterrorism Center on Thursday, following a similar trip to the Pentagon earlier in the week and an Oval Office address to the nation last week. He is trying to make the case that his administration is succeeding in its fight against terrorism and the Islamic State, but even some members of his own party are grumbling that he needs a new strategy.

No kidding.

Mr. Obama emphasized again that vigilance against terrorism should not lead Americans to sacrifice values that define the nation — a direct response to remarks from the Republican campaigns.

“We have to remind ourselves that when we stay true to our values, nothing can defeat us,” Mr. Obama said, adding: “We’ve prevailed over much greater threats than this. We will prevail again.”

Uh huh. Of course, his common sense is that we should suspend due process and deny people the right to purchase weapons if they are arbitrarily or accidentally placed by the Executive Branch on a watchlist, with no judicial oversight. Suspending the Constitution is simply common sense, not giving in to fear.

Of course, I see that the San Bernardino terrorists were motivated by the teachings of Anwar al-Awlaki, the American imam killed by a drone strike in 2011. AL-Awlaki also met with some 9/11 hijackers and exchanged emails with Maj. Hasan, the 2009 Ft. Hood shooter. Quite a record.

So my 'common sense' tells me that if an imam, or "thought leader" such as a columnist is on the terror watchlist it would be foolhardy to allow them to publish or host private meetings. Common sense. Whatever.

In his meeting with the columnists, Mr. Obama indicated that he did not see enough cable television to fully appreciate the anxiety after the attacks in Paris and San Bernardino, and made clear that he plans to step up his public arguments. Republicans were telling Americans that he is not doing anything when he is doing a lot, he said.

He spent part of the conversation expressing pique at Republicans. For all of the attention paid to Mr. Trump, he said, the ideas that the Republican candidates are promoting have been part of a longer-term strategy of the party. And they have been successful to a point, Mr. Obama added, noting that many Americans believe he is a Muslim who was not born in the United States.

Yeah, fourteen people are dead in San Bernardino but the real outrage is that some people think this loser is a Muslim, not that there is anything wrong with that since Islam means peace.

And if Republicans have been promoting the ides that Obama is an out-of-touch elitist, well, what is being implied with "Mr. Obama indicated that he did not see enough cable television to fully appreciate the anxiety after the attacks in Paris and San Bernardino"? What, his pollsters didn't get back to him with the news that the bitter-clingers in flyover country were restless?

I wonder if Hillary has some intention of being President of all Americans, not just the ones she likes who also like her. Hope and change.

Updated, 5:56 p.m. | One is the leader of a declining superpower that is trying to reassert itself militarily. The other wants to “make America great again.” And the two have a budding bromance that transcends the tense relationship between the two nations.

On Thursday, Donald J. Trump appeared to pick up an endorsement from President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia. After his year-ending press conference in Moscow, Mr. Putin heaped praise on the bombastic Republican candidate, calling Mr. Trump “a very bright and talented man” and “the absolute leader of the presidential race.”

OMG, is everybody in the world obliged to talk about Trump? My Bold New Year Prediction: SETI (The Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence" will finely pick up interstellar chatter and the discussion topic will be Trump's hair.

Trump was not to be outdone:

Mr. Trump embraced Mr. Putin’s praise on Thursday evening.

“It is always a great honor to be so nicely complimented by a man so highly respected within his own country and beyond,” he said in a statement. “I have always felt that Russia and the United States should be able to work well with each other towards defeating terrorism and restoring world peace, not to mention trade and all of the other benefits derived from mutual respect.”

Rush Limbaugh made a heroic effort to sort out the Rubio/Cruz gang of Eight dispute but ended up contradicting himself and making no sense. [UPDATE: NY Times 9/12/2013 - "Cruz Tries to Claim the Middle Ground on Immigration", which was amnesty but no path to citizenship.]

Early on Rush explained that the Gang of Eight plan had two components. The first was legalization, also called amnesty, which would resolve the, hmm, undocumented status of the 12-20 million illegal aliens (his estimate) already in the US. Such a feat could be accomplished by awarding, for example, green cards, which authorize residence and employment and may provide access to some public benefits.

The second component was a "path to citizenship", which would include the right to vote.

The unholy alliance (my hardly original) backing this was the Chamber of Commerce Republican establishment seeking cheap labor and the Democratic party seeking new voters. For the Chamber of Commerce, legalization would be sufficient; Democrats needed the path to citizenship.

Over to Rush, my emphasis:

And those are the two factors here all of this is revolving around. The Gang of Eight bill contained two key elements: legalization of those in the shadows, and the path to citizenship, and the path to citizenship is where they can go register to vote. And the key, the focus on defeating the bill was to show people that its real purpose was to provide immediate citizenship and the right to vote for however many illegal aliens are in the country. And that number is anywhere from 12 to 20 million, and maybe more.

It was not just legalization. It was not just granting them amnesty for violating the law, being here illegally. The Gang of Eight bill also contained a provision that put them on a path to citizenship. And you know damn well, if that had passed, and if the path to citizenship required a five-year wait, Chuck Schumer would have been to the cameras and microphones within two hours of the bill passing and signed by the president and said, "This is unfair. We've just granted 'em a path to citizenship and they have to wait five years? That's not fair. We need to move this up. They should be able to register to vote tomorrow." And that would have passed. And so the effort to defeat the Gang of Eight bill was to expose to as many people as possible that the real purpose of the Gang of Eight was not legalization, but the path to citizenship.

Rush explains the Ted Cruz poison pill, which was legalization without citizenship. His theme is that this would never have been acceptable to Democrats:

And this is where Cruz enters the picture here. Ted Cruz proposed a series of amendments in committee that were intended to make sure that the legislation did not end up being a path to citizenship. And people involved in this didn't want to admit that that's what was going on here. A lot of people who supported the Gang of Eight bill did not want to admit that it contained a path to citizenship, Republicans and Democrats. I mean, it was total deceit here that was underway. The proponents of the bill were trying to hide behind the fact that all it was was legalization, humanitarian, compassionate legalization. They wanted to make sure nobody knew or as very few people as possible knew that it contained a path to citizenship, because a path to citizenship equals right to vote.

Now, one of the amendments that Ted Cruz proposed stripped out the path to citizenship portion of the bill, but it left the legalization part in. And that has opened the door for opponents of Cruz to say, "He voted for legalization." And Cruz is saying, no, I didn't vote for legalization. I did vote, but I was voting to keep citizenship out of it. I put my amendment in to expose the path to citizenship.

So, was Cruz sabotaging the bill with a smile on his face but ice in his heart (the current Cruz story), or did he really think that long-term green card status with no path to citizenship might be a responsible compromise (which he said at the time, but maybe that was just the smile on his face).

He was clear not just in proposing it, but in the appearance he made at Princeton talking about this, that he offered the amendment as a compromise because he wanted to see it pass. See, the two stories of Cruz are that he actually offered this amendment to take out the citizenship plank because he wanted the Gang of Eight bill to pass so that he could say down the road that he had voted for and been a participant in a compromise piece of legislation, that he had worked with people and had helped get something done, and so he was not presenting his amendment as a poison pill when he was talking to certain groups.

That is the opposite of a poison pill. He did this in an appearance at Princeton with a law professor who is a close associate and friend of his. Cruz was actually in a Q&A that he had with a professor there named Robbie George. Cruz: "The amendment I introduced affected only citizenship; it did not affect the underlying legalization in the Gang of Eight bill." Robbie George said, "Would your bill pass the House, or would it be killed because it was proposing ‘amnesty’?" Cruz said, "I believe that if my amendments were adopted, the bill would pass. My effort in introducing them was to find solution that reflected common ground and fixed the problem."

So far, this is all comprehensible, consistent, and jibes with what I have read elsewhere (and would link, on a better day). But then Rush loses his own storyline (my emphasis):

BREAK TRANSCRIPT

RUSH: Okay. So in the limited time remaining in this segment 'cause I went long, I'm gonna give you the end result of this again and in the next segment go back and pick up in order. The bottom line is Ted Cruz has never voted for amnesty. The proponents of the Gang of Eight bill have, including Rubio. But Cruz did propose an amendment in 2013 which would have authorized legalization. Of course, what legalization meant then versus what people think it means today are two different things, probably.

But Ted Cruz never supported amnesty. He wants to say now that his amendment was designed to kill the Gang of Eight bill, but in 2013 he was telling people that he really wanted the bill to pass, that he wanted a reform package that he was instrumental in having passed, but that did not include amnesty, it just included legalization. And of course the Democrats, nobody wanted anything but amnesty

So the bottom line is the Gang of Eight bill failed, and people are attempting to make others believe that Ted Cruz secretly supported amnesty at one time and is lying about it, and that didn't happen.

Huh? Cruz supported legalization but opposed amnesty? Earlier in the show those were two different ways of saying the same thing, and were distinct from the path to citizenship.

The Cruz amendment would have delighted the Chamber of Commerce Republicans without swelling Democratic voter rolls. Of course, working class natives worried about their inability to get jobs or raises are worried about amnesty maybe even more than the path to citizenship.

In any case, Rush came out for Cruz, although he emphasized he wasn't taking sides:

BREAK TRANSCRIPT

RUSH: You know, another way to look at this is that powerful forces are trying to rewrite the history of the debate on the Gang of Eight bill. Because the history of the Gang of Eight bill is not particularly helpful to -- and, by the way, I like Marco Rubio. This is why I don't endorse, folks, in primaries. This exact circumstance is why I do not endorse in primaries. I don't want to get caught in something like this -- having to defend somebody on something that I didn't know was gonna come up -- and just be in my best interests.

So I'm defending nobody here. I'm trying to cut through all of this noise and get to the essence of this for you. Because it's all over the media, and it's clear that Trump and Cruz are under assault. It's a primary. This is normal. This is what should and does happen, and I am not angry at anybody. I'm just trying to decipher this for you. That's what we do here; we make the complex understandable. And there are some people that would very much like to have you think that Ted Cruz was much more for amnesty or involved in it, because that would take some pressure off other people who actually were.

When it comes to immigration reform, Senator Ted Cruz has made it abundantly clear what he opposes: giving citizenship to people who broke the law to come here.

What has not been as evident is what he supports: legal status for millions of people here already, while making it easier for immigrants to come here through the front door.

“I have said many times that I want to see common-sense immigration reform pass,” he said. “I think most Americans want to see the problem fixed.”

After explaining that Cruz has Tea Partiers on one side and business interests as well as a growing Hispanic population in Texas on the other, they deliver some quotes:

What Mr. Cruz has tried to articulate in both word and deed is a middle ground. It got no support from Democrats in Washington, but it goes further than many on the far right want to go by offering leniency to undocumented immigrants here already: A path to legal status, but not to citizenship. A green card with no right to naturalization.

Immigration-reform legislation from the Senate’s so-called Gang of Eight passed that chamber in June and includes a 13-year path to citizenship. Mr. Cruz pushed unsuccessfully for amendments that would have, among other things, eliminated the citizenship component.

Asked about what to do with the people here illegally, however, he stressed that he had never tried to undo the goal of allowing them to stay.

“The amendment that I introduced removed the path to citizenship, but it did not change the underlying work permit from the Gang of Eight,” he said during a recent visit to El Paso. Mr. Cruz also noted that he had not called for deportation or, as Mitt Romney famously advocated, self-deportation.

Mr. Cruz said recent polling indicated that people outside Washington support some reform, including legal status without citizenship. He said he was against naturalization because it rewarded lawbreakers and was unfair to legal immigrants. It also perpetuates illegal crossings, he added.

It is clear that he understood the Democrats would never accept the bill without a path to citizenship, but his own words certainly suggest he thinks -or thought - his suggestion does represent a plausible compromise.

The three Navy SEALs stomped on the bound Afghan detainees and dropped heavy stones on their chests, the witnesses recalled. They stood on the prisoners’ heads and poured bottles of water on some of their faces in what, to a pair of Army soldiers, appeared to be an improvised form of waterboarding.

A few hours earlier, shortly after dawn on May 31, 2012, a bomb had exploded at a checkpoint manned by an Afghan Local Police unit that the SEALs were training. Angered by the death of one of their comrades in the blast, the police militiamen had rounded up half a dozen or more suspects from a market in the village of Kalach and forced them to a nearby American outpost. Along the way, they beat them with rifle butts and car antennas.

A United States Army medic standing guard at the base, Specialist David Walker, had expected the men from SEAL Team 2 to put a stop to the abuse. Instead, he said, one of them “jump-kicked this guy kneeling on the ground.” Two others joined in, Specialist Walker and several other soldiers recounted, and along with the Afghan militiamen, they beat the detainees so badly that by dusk, one would die.

The four American soldiers working with the SEALs reported the episode, which has not previously been disclosed. In a Navy criminal investigation, two Navy support personnel said they had witnessed some abuse by the SEALs, as did a local police officer. Separately, an Afghan detained with the man who died provided a detailed account of mistreatment by American troops and Afghan militiamen in an interview with The New York Times.

The SEAL command, though, cleared the Team 2 members of wrongdoing in a closed disciplinary process that is typically used only for minor infractions, disregarding a Navy lawyer’s recommendation that the troops face assault charges and choosing not to seek a court-martial. Two of the SEALs and their lieutenant have since been promoted, even though their commander in Afghanistan recommended that they be forced out of the elite SEAL teams.

“It just comes down to what’s wrong and what’s right,” Specialist Walker said in a recent interview. “You can’t squint hard enough to make this gray.”

Navy SEALs are about as hardcore as it gets but Specialist Walker may be a bit of a stud himself, we should note:

With broad shoulders and blond hair — his nickname was Thor — Specialist Walker could not have looked more foreign to Afghans.

There was a mismatch of mission and training:

The small base at Kalach was just a speck in Afghanistan’s rugged terrain, dwarfed by the mountains behind it. The stone wall surrounding the outpost was barely chest-high, offering little protection from a Taliban attack. The objective was to get Americans close to the people they were training, instead of living behind high blast walls and shiny razor wire like most of the troops in the United States-led coalition in Afghanistan.

The outpost was set up by Green Berets, the Army Special Forces troops who recruited the Afghan Local Police. The militia program had become a crucial element of the American strategy to win over villagers and undercut the Taliban. The emphasis on counterinsurgency, as the strategy was known, aligned with the skills of the Green Berets, who were trained to wage guerrilla campaigns by working with irregular militias and supporting local communities.

The Navy’s nine SEAL teams, in contrast, typically conduct capture-and-kill missions and train militaries and counterterrorism forces in other countries. In a place like Kalach, “you need a combination of T.E. Lawrence, John Rambo and the Verizon guy,” said Scott Mann, a former Green Beret who helped design what were known as village stability operations in Afghanistan. “There’s a lot of the Special Ops community that would much rather shoot somebody in the face than do this kind of work.”

...

“We had to fill so many emerging requirements with units that weren’t necessarily as prepared as they could have been,” said Mr. Mann, the former Green Beret. “There’s a whole mind-set and training curriculum that goes with Green Berets that’s radically different from Navy SEALs.”

The change in tone was soon apparent. Staff Sgt. David Roschak, the Army squad leader at Kalach, said the new arrivals assumed “anyone near the base was, or linked to, the Taliban.” Some of the Team 2 members saw their job as killing enemies, not making friends, he and other soldiers said in interviews.

As others describe it, a serious attitude problem developed:

Serious discipline issues emerged, according to the soldiers. Apparently bored by the routine of life on the small outpost, several of the SEALs began using their weapons for sport. One shot his pistol wildly at a kitten under the ammunition shed, the soldiers said; anyone at the small base, then full of people, could have been hit by a ricochet. Another pulled a handgun on a soldier in the base gym, apparently as a joke.

“They were very sloppy, very boisterous: ‘We’re here to destroy everything,’ ” Specialist Walker said. In a situation with “a gun battle every day, that’s perfect,” he continued. But “we’re here to train people, assist, not there to gag ’em and bag ’em.”

Afghans described in interviews how the new group of Americans would shoot at the ground around farmers in wheat fields and almond groves near the base, or on the road to the market. A few times, they shot at trucks moving along a ridgeline. “They weren’t trying to kill anyone,” Mr. Gizabe, the Kalach elder, said. “They were toying with them, I think.”

The tenor of the meetings between the Americans and the elders changed, too, villagers said. The SEALs often shouted at the Afghans; when they disagreed, several elders recounted in interviews, the SEALs sometimes grabbed them by their shirts, lifted them off the ground and cocked their arms back as if preparing to hit them. “Each and every time we went to their base, we feared we would not come back out,” Mullah Muhammadzai said.

If I may engage in a bit of armchair psychologizing, this sounds like some of the stories that came out of Vietnam. Somewhat similarly, we had a long, seemingly pointless war with US troops planted amongst a civilian population of very different culture and physical appearance. Some of those civilians wanted to help the Americans, some wanted to kill the Americans. The tension was continuous. And, if the stories can be believed (and without exaggerating to Kerry's "Army of Ghengis Khan" level), one might argue that some soldiers some of the time engaged in dehumanizing of the locals.

One last thought, from the Times:

Brushing away serious charges, military justice experts said, reflects a breakdown of accountability that feeds the perception that SEALs and other elite Special Operations units get undue leeway when it comes to discipline. In murky wars with unclear battle lines, they warned, that can corrode ethical clarity and undermine morale.

“What’s the message for the 10,000 guys that were in the same moment and said, ‘No, we’re not crossing this line’?” asked Geoffrey S. Corn, a former military lawyer who was the Army’s senior expert adviser on the law of war. “It diminishes the immense courage it takes to maintain that line between legitimate and illegitimate violence.”

December 16, 2015

A Victory Lap open thread for whomever won the debate last night. Or The Voice, although how much Reality TV can we endure?

As some wag surely noted the big loser was the public's grasp of American foreign policy - in however long this took, there was no discussion of the Iran non-treaty, the climate change non-treaty, Obama's re-opening to Cuba, our fraught relations with China, Putin and the Ukraine, the collapse of Europe in the face of their refugee debacle... actually, a lot was left out.

I came away with the strong impression (as did Doc Drezner) that Ted Cruz has no idea what "carpet bombing" or "saturation" bombing means (or meant) and that The Donald would be up on stage a long time before he realized that conversation about the three legs of our nuclear stool is not a reference to Iron Man on a high-fiber diet.

I thought Rubio did as well as he could on immigration, claiming that his eyes were opened and he learned a lesson about the importance of Border Security First during the Gang of Eight debacle. Ted Cruz was transparently lawyerly in this phase, which was not a good look for him.

The group sing-along to "How Do You Solve A Problem Like Sy-ri-a?" was interesting. Strong support from some for Assad as a strongman in a troubled region, others insisting that Assad must go. Barry Red Line has tried both sides of this debate, so something for everyone.

December 15, 2015

Its a fine day for the Irish when I feel obliged to write to NY Times Public Editor Margaret Sullivan. My now open letter below:

Ms. Sullivan;

I read with interest your column about instant "fact-checking" being brought into the news stories. I wonder whether readers can expect the same fact-checking standards displayed on the editorial page.

The Brady Law Most needed is an expansion of this law so that dealers and others now buying firearms on the Internet and at gun shows are subjected to background checks. The law has barred 2.5 million risky applicants in the last 20 years from buying guns, but it does not apply to 40 percent of total gun sales.

Times readers may not know that various gun control advocates have made this "40 percent of sales" claim over the last few years. It has been debunked by:

If that is the standard of credibility and the respect for fact-checking that is displayed on the editorial page, what should we expect from the news side? One possible guess is that any advocacy supported by the Times editors will get a free pass.

An imperative first step is universal background checks to acquire a gun. New Harvard research suggests that about 40 percent of guns in America are acquired without a background check — which is just unconscionable.

That 40 percent figure includes gifts and inheritances, not just the "Internet and at gun show" sales cited by the editors. So sure, maybe Congress needs to close or clean up the birthday/Christmas gift loophole as well as the right to bequeath property upon one's death. Although I can already imagine the pushback - they'll have to pry this wrapping paper from my cold, dead hands...

And scissors! Don't forget, these people are armed.

Please let me note - the new Harvard research estimates that 40% of guns are acquired by way of mechanisms not subject to background checks, then concludes that 20 million of the 300 million guns in America were so acquired. I don't claim to be the biggest math guy, but 40% of 300 million is 120 million, which looks to be 5-7 times larger than the 20 million unchecked guns they noted. I have no idea how to reconcile that since the study is not yet available, but maybe the Times fact-checkers will be on this.

Thanks for your attention. I hope you enjoy the holidays. If you have a chance to look at the editors cringe-inducing link to a rival of The Onion which I wrote about last week, that would be great. That was in

And to be honest, although I described the link as "cringe-inducing", when I showed it to my college-age son he didn't cringe at all. He thought it was one of the funnier things he has seen in the Times in a while, and after saying something snide about the people who whine that the Times has no funny pages he wandered off to watch some football.

So your editors are spreading mirth in the holiday season, and who amongst us is so churlish as to belittle that?

Regards,

With the nations current oxycontin crackdown the job of NYT Public Editor must be impossible. Happy Holidays to her.

ISIS a step away from Libya oil wells, plans to seize them – French DM

France has warned that Islamic State (IS, formerly ISIS/ISIL) has its sights set on Libya’s lucrative oil wells. The militant group’s oil revenues are taking a hit following Russian and Western military intervention in Syria.

The announcement was made by French Defense Minister Jean-Yves Le Drian, who said IS forces are moving inland from their coastal strongholds into Libya’s interior, where much of the oil wells are located.

"They are in Sirte and their territory extends 250km along the coast. However, they are starting to penetrate into the interior and may be tempted by the oil wells and reserves on offer," Le Drian told RTL radio.

Scary! But how do we say "Remain calm" in French?

Despite the alarming statement, Le Drian has ruled out any military intervention in Libya.

In recent weeks, we’ve unleashed a new wave of strikes on their lifeline, their oil infrastructure, destroying hundreds of their tanker trucks, wells and refineries. And we’re going to keep on hammering those.

He's so cool. And thanks to his fearless and relentless campaign against ISIS oil, we all will be.

WEIRD, RIGHT? Our President is keeping his cool just when "hot" is what you want.

Back in the day Christopher Hitchens wrote a history of the Clinton experience, titled "No One Left To Lie To". I am looking to the inevitable history of the Obama debacle titled "No One Left to Snark To". We elected a a candidate who slyly gave the finger to both Hillary and John McCain and he has eagerly wooed the Beavis and Butthead demographic ever since.

President Obama’s top spokesman isn’t buying Donald Trump’s medical report declaring the GOP front-runner would be the healthiest person ever elected president.

“Is the suggestion that Mr. Trump’s doctor conducted a thorough medical examination of President Jefferson and President Adams?” Josh Earnest replied when asked Monday if Trump is healthier than Obama.

“That’s a lot of work — that’s a lot of homework to do,” he added. “Forty-four presidents to take a look at.”

Earnest offered up a generous dose of sarcasm when asked if the billionaire real estate mogul’s doctor deserves to be fact checked.

“From here, I would not call into question the medical credentials of somebody who decides they are ready to conduct a medical examination of Mr. Trump,” the spokesman said. “That must have been a pretty interesting appointment.”

December 14, 2015

Sure, ISIS uses Facebook and Twitter to recruit, but should we check Facebook and Twitter to evaluate visa applicants? No so fast, you privacy pirate! Those foreigners have civil rights too, or something; from ABC News:

Secret US Policy Blocks Agents From Looking at Social Media of Visa Applicants, Former Official Says

Fearing a civil liberties backlash and "bad public relations" for the Obama administration, Homeland Security Secretary Jeh Johnson refused in early 2014 to end a secret U.S. policy that prohibited immigration officials from reviewing the social media messages of all foreign citizens applying for U.S. visas, a former senior department official said.

"During that time period immigration officials were not allowed to use or review social media as part of the screening process," John Cohen, a former acting under-secretary at DHS for intelligence and analysis. Cohen is now a national security consultant for ABC News.

One current and one former senior counter-terrorism official confirmed Cohen's account about the refusal of DHS to change its policy about the public social media posts of all foreign applicants.

Bad public relations"? Well, they are getting that.

Here's a pro tip for our hard-working government officials - if you are trying to choose between protecting the lives of Americans and protecting the civil liberties of foreigners not covered by the US Constitution, don't overthink it.

Yes, we understand that a portion of Obama's base hates America even more than ISIS does, but still, Obama is President of all Americans, even the bitter-clingers in flyover country. And that will be true for another year, regardless of how much both sides regret it. Think of it as a bad marriage with a delayed court date. Smile, be civil, don't pour hot coffee on each other - we can get through this. And think of the children.

#TheHolidaysAreHardest

WHOSE FACE IS RED NOW?

Former DHS under-secretary Cohen said he and others pressed hard for just such a policy change in 2014 that would allow a review of publicly-posted social media messages as terror group followers increasingly used Twitter and Facebook to show their allegiance to a variety of jihadist groups.

Cohen said officials from United States Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) and U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) both pressed for a change in policy.

"Immigration, security, law enforcement officials recognized at the time that it was important to more extensively review public social media postings because they offered potential insights into whether somebody was an extremist or potentially connected to a terrorist organization or a supporter of the movement," said Cohen, who left DHS in June 2014.

Cohen said the issue reached a head at a heated 2014 meeting chaired by Homeland Security Deputy Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas, other top deputies and representatives of the DHS Office of Civil Liberties and the Office of Privacy.

"The primary concern was that it would be viewed negatively if it was disclosed publicly and there were concerns that it would be embarrassing," Cohen said in an interview broadcast on "Good Morning America" today.

Americans are twice as willing to distance Christian extremists from their religion as Muslims

That is based on a recent Public Religion Research Institute survey:

Perhaps the most striking questions, though, were a pair in which the pollsters asked whether people were willing to distance terrorists from the religions in whose name they claimed to be acting. (The questions were: "When people claim to be Muslim/Christian and commit acts of violence in the name of Islam/Christianity, do you believe they really are Muslim/Christian, or not?")

Americans were nearly twice as willing to assume that those saying they were committing violent acts in the name of Christianity weren't real Christians than they were to make the same distinction for Muslims. (Many terrorist acts, of course, are a subset of this category.)

Bizarre. Despite all the video of the Pope leading chants of "Death to Iran" and the New York city riots following the display of "Piss Christ"? Bishops issuing orders to the faithful to kill offensive writers? Forgotten. And I'm not even talking about the theatre that was burned down after it tried to host "Book of Mormon".

The WaPo includes the inevitable high-minded assurance that rubes who don't believe that Islam always and everywhere means peace are giving the terrorists just what they want:

Part of that is probably a result of familiarity; more Americans understand the basics of Christianity than Islam and may be likely to assume that Islam provides more allowance for violent acts (47 percent of respondents considered the values of Islam "at odds with American values").

Regardless, this also shows that the Islamic State is being successful. Its goal of driving a wedge between the West and the Muslim world relies on precisely these sorts of distinctions.

Hmm, the Great Unwashed are more inclined to take Muslim violence as an expression of an Islamic tilt towards violence and intolerance. Do we have any hashtags for that? I suggest: #ISISsaysTheyAreIslamicButIDK

And for the gun nuts responsible gun rights advocate and owners out there: #IslamMeansPiece

December 13, 2015

We learn something new every day. Today we learned that Facebook and Twitter are for ISIS recruiting and boasting, not actual national security work.

One week ago, Obama delivered an Oval Office address meant to reassure an American public shocked by the ISIS-inspired husband and wife terror killings in San Bernardino. His gist: He developed a plan fourteen months ago, the results are visible on the blood-stained streets of Paris and San Bernardino, so we are staying the course. Oh, and since ISIS is here and we can't stop them, law-abiding citizens should turn in their guns.

"And we constantly examine our strategy to determine when additional steps are needed to get the job done. That’s why I’ve ordered the Departments of State and Homeland Security to review the visa waiver program under which the female terrorist in San Bernardino originally came to this country."

Seems like a good idea. Oh, but wait - a correction came out an hour after the speech. The President mentioned the wrong visa program, but otherwise he and his team are on top of it.

The visa waiver program relates to 38 sensible countries such as the UK and Australia for whom no visa is required for visits of up to 90 days.

Bride of Jihad entered under the K-1 program, described by the LA Times as follows:

The K1 visa is a previously obscure program reserved for foreign men and women intending to marry a U.S. citizen. Authorities now probing Wednesday’s massacre as a terrorist attack have said K1 applicants, like other visa applicants, undergo an extensive counterterrorism screening that includes checks based on fingerprints and facial recognition software.

WASHINGTON — Tashfeen Malik, who with her husband carried out the massacre in San Bernardino, Calif., passed three background checks by American immigration officials as she moved to the United States from Pakistan. None uncovered what Ms. Malik had made little effort to hide — that she talked openly on social media about her views on violent jihad.

She said she supported it. And she said she wanted to be a part of it.

American law enforcement officials said they recently discovered those old — and previously unreported — postings as they pieced together the lives of Ms. Malik and her husband, Syed Rizwan Farook, trying to understand how they pulled off the deadliest terrorist attack on American soil since Sept. 11, 2001.

Had the authorities found the posts years ago, they might have kept her out of the country. But immigration officials do not routinely review social media as part of their background checks, and there is a debate inside the Department of Homeland Security over whether it is even appropriate to do so.

"Appropriate"? Those jihadist wanna-bes have privacy rights too, you know! Not under US law, since they are aliens, but under some Universal Law of Political Correctness, or something. More importantly, who has time to read?

The discovery of the old social media posts has exposed a significant — and perhaps inevitable — shortcoming in how foreigners are screened when they enter the United States, particularly as people everywhere disclose more about themselves online. Tens of millions of people are cleared each year to come to this country to work, visit or live. It is impossible to conduct an exhaustive investigation and scour the social media accounts of each of them, law enforcement officials say.

Wait, "tens of millions" come here each year? How many come on the K-1 program for spouses-to-be? Per Wikipedia, about 40,000 per year, two orders of magnitude less than "tens of millions". Whatever - presumably the Times sources were hardworking intelligence officials trying to avoid a complete collapse of public confidence.

And the implications for the K-1 program?

The Obama administration is trying to determine whether those background checks can be expanded without causing major delays in the popular program. In an attempt to ensure they did not miss threats from men and women who entered the country the same way Ms. Malik did, immigration officials are also reviewing all of about 90,000 K-1 visas issued in the past two years and are considering a moratorium on new ones while they determine whether changes should be made.

“Somebody entered the United States through the K-1 visa program and proceeded to carry out an act of terrorism on American soil,” the White House spokesman, Josh Earnest, said on Thursday. “That program is at a minimum worth a very close look.”

A closer look and a possible moratorium. Obviously that moratorium would apply to everyone, not just Muslims, but still - Trump's hate-filled kookiness on Monday, when he said these visa programs need to be put on pause for Muslims while Congress sorts them out, is headed in the direction of becoming Administration policy a few days later.

For folks still puzzling over Trump's appeal: If you take him literally, he is nuts. Just for example, Mexico will not be building a wall and paying for it, nor are they deliberately sending their rapist to the US.

But taken metaphorically, Trump's message is "We need greater border security and I will knock heads to provide it". That resonates, and arguing about the height of the wall, whether it should be concrete or barbed wire and whether it will be paid for by the US or Mexico misses the point.

Apparently staying within whistling distance of reality is not an option either, although I will find one point on which we might all agree. I am skipping the grieving Newton parents of murdered schoolchildren intro:

Whether that happens, of course, depends on whether Congress is ever going to break from the gun lobby. Could there be anything less controversial than denying gun purchases to people on the terrorist watch list? Yet Republicans prefer to express concern about “due process” for gun purchasers even as they propose blanket bans on Islamic refugees.

The Brady Law Most needed is an expansion of this law so that dealers and others now buying firearms on the Internet and at gun shows are subjected to background checks. The law has barred 2.5 million risky applicants in the last 20 years from buying guns, but it does not apply to 40 percent of total gun sales.

"40 percent"? Seriously? Before you ask, factcheckers have debunked that claim since Obama and other top Democrats began promoting it post-Newton.; Glenn Kessler resurrected it when Hillary resurrected the claim last October.

FactCheck.org: No flashy scoring system, so we have to prove their nuance, although the intro contains a clue:

Editor’s note: This is one of an occasional series called “Party Lines” that will highlight misleading talking points by both parties.:

...

But with the exception of Biden, hardly anyone using the figure ever cautions that it may not be accurate, or, at the very least, that it was based on a survey of just a few hundred people in 1994, in which participants may have guessed whether they had acquired a gun that came from a licensed dealer. Instead, the number is quite often stated as fact when no one can say for certain.

These Times demand the Times, or, The Paper of (Broken) Record.

Back to the earnest editors:

Battlefield Guns and Ammunition A responsible Congress would restore the assault weapons ban and enact limits on gross ammunition clips that let shooters spray crowds of victims with up to 100-round bursts.

The burst you hear is laughter. Do they even know that semi-automatic weapons fire one shot per trigger pull, or are they having a flashback to the Imperial Storm Troopers in the Star Wars trailer?

Their own polling on that issue has gone against them, so it seems as if the Great Unwashed are figuring out just how phony the assault weapons debate is, even if the Times has not.

Now, shifting gears - here is a topic where the two parties could find common ground:

Mental Illness Services undoubtedly need to be improved for Americans with mental illnesses as a public health issue, but recalcitrant Republicans are invoking this to duck gun safety measures. They should be the first to embrace a practical law pioneered last year in California that allows concerned family members to alert a judge to issue a gun restraining order on a potState Laws Gun safety laws work in states where they are applied, even if other states are lax. Those with weak gun laws and high rates of gun ownership suffer the highest gun death rates, according to research. Alaska, where 60 percent of households have guns, had 19.5 gun deaths per 100,000 in 2013. The rate was 2.7 in Hawaii where 9.7 percent of households have arms.entially violent individual.

I don't know about the California law but it sounds like the sort of thing I have favored at cocktail parties (Yes, sometime we are not talking about real estate prices and golf scores. Inshallah). Whether Adam Lanza's mother or one of James Holmes (Aurora) associates could have/would have been able to use such a law will remain unknown.

The National Journal has more, including pushback from critics who say that, like other temporary restraining orders, the accused does not have an opportunity to participate. Those are details of the George Bernard Shaw "fixing my price" type.

And a Republican has a bill overlapping expanded mental health care access with gun violence, so there should be room for constructive debate here.

OK, back to Times-bashing:

State Laws Gun safety laws work in states where they are applied, even if other states are lax. Those with weak gun laws and high rates of gun ownership suffer the highest gun death rates, according to research. Alaska, where 60 percent of households have guns, had 19.5 gun deaths per 100,000 in 2013. The rate was 2.7 in Hawaii where 9.7 percent of households have arms.

Yeah, the South is violent, and, as usual, the Times is using "gun violence" to cover suicides as well as homicides (suicides are roughly two-thirds of total gun deaths). If the topic is mental health that seems appropriate, but the link between suicides and an assault weapons ban seems, well, unlikely - are people really firing bursts of up to 100 rounds into themselves and then bleeding out? Folks looking at gun homicide rates versus weak/strong gun laws see no correlation, which still answers little, since the laws were presumably passed to bring violence down to acceptable levels; a state with a low crime problem, e.g., Wyoming, might well not pass any gun laws.

The "according to research" link provided by the editors takes us to the Violence Policy Center, which is a step up from their recent editorial linking to a rival of The Onion. At the VPC there is no clarification of the suicide/homicide split, but they explain weak versus strong gun laws:

The VPC defined states with “weak” gun violence prevention laws as those that add little or nothing to federal law and have permissive laws governing the open or concealed carrying of firearms in public. States with “strong” gun violence prevention laws were defined as those that add significant state regulation that is absent from federal law, such as restricting access to particularly hazardous and deadly types of firearms (for example, assault weapons), setting minimum safety standards for firearms and/or requiring a permit to purchase a firearm, and restricting the open and concealed carrying of firearms in public.

And do let me add that I glanced at the gun suicide versus all suicide rate in different countries last week. As a snippet, the gun suicide rate was 6.7 per 100,000, versus 0.15 per 100,000 in the UK. Fewer guns saves lives!

Well, that is probably true since in some case, especially younger people, the suicidal impulse is transient but guns are quick and effective. However, the overall suicide rate in the US was 13 per 100,000; in the UK it was 11.8 per 100,000.

That difference, given the differing demographics, might well be statistical noise. In any case, it is far smaller a gap than the 6.5 per 100,000 in the gun suicide case. Ross Douthat was excellent on this post-Newtown, unlike many of his media compadres.

SUICIDE, HOMICIDE, SO CONFUSING: The NY Times closed their comments after receiving 521. The editors highlighted 15, including this one, which was recommended by 106 readers. Tell me whether he understands that two-thirds of deaths attributable to "gun violence" are suicides. Then tell me why the editors elevated this comment from among more than five hundred:

James

One word that does not appear enough in the New York Times coverage of gun violence is "murder." The constant repetition of the terms "gun violence" and "gun deaths" makes it seem as if death and violence simply arise unbidden from the inanimate substrate of guns.This mangling of the language is purely politically driven. For every murder, there is a murderer. For every death there is a killer. Living in denial of the vicious, monstrous people in our midst might make you sound cool-headed, data-driven, and scientific, but it is actually ignorant and childish.Accidental gun deaths represent the intrinsic danger of guns. Intentional gun deaths represent the cruelty and cold-bloodedness of our fellow citizens. There is a huge difference.

106 Recommend

"For every death there is a killer"? Do we normally call suicide victims "killers"? How about "Intentional gun deaths represent the cruelty and cold-bloodedness of our fellow citizens" - is that how we normally describe suicides?

I actually think that James is honestly confused about the homicide/suicide game the Times routinelyplays, despite laboring through many NY Times editorials. The editors are promoting his post even though they realize (I hope!) that it is wildly misleading. But emotional and heartfelt, so it has that going for it.

As a bonus Times readers get a sanctimonious lecture on not being haters.

I encourage Times readers to approach reality very slowly. For example, this Pew Research polling is presented with just the right spin:

In nations with significant Muslim populations, much disdain for ISIS

"Much" disdain? Put that in the "Mostly dead is partly alive" file:

One exception was Pakistan, where a majority offered no definite opinion of ISIS. The nationally representative surveys were conducted as part of the Pew Research Center’s annual global poll in April and May this year.

In no country surveyed did more than 15% of the population show favorable attitudes toward Islamic State.

Oh, so no more than 15% have a positive view of YouTubed beheadings, burning, execution of Christians, executions of Muslims... good to know.

To hold the percentages down they aggregate Christian and Musliim responses in countries like Nigeria in the main chart. Later on the data get more grim:

In Nigeria, there was somewhat more support for ISIS (14% favorable) compared with other countries, but attitudes differed sharply by religious affiliation. An overwhelming number of Nigerian Christians (71%) had an unfavorable view of ISIS, as did 61% of Nigerian Muslims. However, 20% of Nigerian Muslims had a favorable view of ISIS when the poll was conducted in the spring of this year.

From a different perspective, we might note that Muslims have been battling Hindus in Kashmir for my entire life. That have been battling Jews in Israel my entire life. Muslims have been hijacking Western airliners, arguably Christian, and engaging in other anti-Christian hostility since the 1970's. Is there a common theme?

And Muslim attitudes towards the separation of church and state? Not quite up to contemporary Western norms:

Overwhelming percentages of Muslims in many countries want Islamic law (sharia) to be the official law of the land, according to a worldwide survey by the Pew Research Center. But many supporters of sharia say it should apply only to their country’s Muslim population.

Moreover, Muslims are not equally comfortable with all aspects of sharia: While most favor using religious law in family and property disputes, fewer support the application of severe punishments – such as whippings or cutting off hands – in criminal cases. The survey also shows that Muslims differ widely in how they interpret certain aspects of sharia, including whether divorce and family planning are morally acceptable.

Obviously, polls and averages can't identify what is in any one person's heart, so generalizations and stereotyping from this is problematic. However, it might give one pause before blithely insisting that there are no issues whatsoever with integrating Muslims into a modern Western society and anyone who thinks otherwise is a hater.

December 12, 2015

Trump's Muslim travel ban may be dumb but laid-back, do-nothing Obama is even dumber

...

But Trump’s not the enemy here, ISIS are - and it’s very important to remember that.

I watched President Obama’s address to the nation from the Oval Office a few days ago and thought it was dreadful.

He sounded utterly devoid of any real new ideas on how to tackle ISIS, whose military and economic power strengthens every day.

He spoke in weary tones of how we were going to beat them but nobody listening to him could have felt remotely convinced that he has a clue how this will actually happen.

His current strategy clearly isn’t working, yet all he promises is more of the same. Gee - you mean "I have been pursuing the same strategy for fourteen months and the results are visible in Beirut, Paris and San Bernardino, so we are going to continue with more of the same" didn't reassure people? "ISIS is here, we can't stop them, so we are asking law-abiding citizens to turn in their guns" didn't catch fire?

Recall that two years ago the President was referring to ISIS as the JV team. And in a major address on ISIS last September he suggested ISIS was only an imminent threat to the region. More recently he claimed that threat was contained. The President always seems to be a day late and a dollar short when it comes to dealing with ISIS.

Given the shift in the national mood is it any surprise that Donald Trump is doing well in the polls? Trump’s problems as a candidate have been cataloged extensively but one thing he is not is a shrinking violet. It may not be clear what his plan is for dealing with ISIS but the tone is clear. Like a lot of Americans he seems to be tired of watching the school bully brutalize and threaten everyone on the playground while the largest adult on campus stands back at a safe distance and promises gradual change.

Well, I disagree a bit - I am afraid that we are stuck with a President who made up his mind that American power was the root of the world's perils back in his freshmen year at Occidental and has learned nothing since.

My final stray thought on the idea of US troops in Syria - not to minimize the effort and courage of the people involved, but liberating Iraq was the easy part; it was the poorly planned occupation/administration that went sour.

There are no Sunni armies capable of matching up with ISIS right now. But could the US lead a vanguard to liberate ISIS-held Syria and Iraq and then find Sunnis to run the occupation? That is what I would be studying.

ACLU Board Member Resigns After Urging People To Kill Supporters Of Trump

After a bit of a Twitter storm (described in a follow-up) Derek Hunter of the Daily Caller had this:

Colorado ACLU Board Member: Shoot Trump Voters ‘Before Election Day’

Loring Wirbel, board member of the American Civil Liberties Union’s Colorado chapter and co-chair of the ACLU’s Colorado Springs chapter, called for supporters of GOP presidential hopeful Donald Trump to be shot before they vote for the billionaire businessman.

It was a shameful Facebook post, complete with a Godwin's law violation.

The CBS story has interesting background and a odd conclusion:

It’s the second threat against Republicans in Colorado in one week.

Fern Delise, 54, of Fountain was arrested after police say she called Planned Parenthood saying, “It’s tempting to walk into a republican party meeting with my dead husband’s gun and just start shooting people.”

Hmm, Love is not Trumping Hate in CO just now. Back to CBS:

Wirbel did not respond to a request for comment. He is from Colorado Springs and police there say his post is covered by free speech and they do not intend to investigate.

If they had said the know the guy is a harmless bloviator that might be different. But does anyone think he would get a "free speech" pass for threatening to shoot ethnics?

December 11, 2015

The NY Times editors, in their crusade against guns, will be linking for support to The Onion any day now.

But for now we have to settle for what they have given us (but do note the correction four months later): I am not sure how to preserve it; a screen shot won't capture the linked URL. But let's have the setup and Punchline:

To listen to the insistent harangues of many gun-rights advocates, one might imagine that the Second Amendment prohibits almost any regulation of firearms.

Fortunately, a majority of the Supreme Court disagrees. On Monday, the court declined to hear a challenge to a Chicago suburb’s law banning semiautomatic assault weapons and magazines that hold more than 10 rounds of ammunition.

As a result, our glorious Federal system allows states and cities to seize the day, or even your guns:

Yeah, yeah. She provides a helpful chart highlighting those lying righties, summarized by a few stats:

Senator Marco Rubio of Florida, for example, has ratings of Mostly False, False and Pants on Fire at the 40 percent mark (out of a sizable 117 statements checked). The former Florida governor Jeb Bush’s negative ratings are at 32 percent out of 71 statements checked, a percentage matched by two other Republican contenders, Gov. Chris Christie of New Jersey and Senator Rand Paul.

In the Democratic race, Senator Bernie Sanders and Hillary Clinton are evenly matched at 28 percent (based on 43 checks of Mr. Sanders and 140 checks of Mrs. Clinton).

...

The president has the distinction of being the most fact-checked person by PolitiFact — by a wide margin, with a whopping 569 statements checked. We’ve rated nine of those Pants on Fire.

But in comparison to Rubio and Clinton, Obama has 26% "False and Worse", slightly less plausible better than Hillarity!

Naturally, we wonder how this can be. So in an utterly unscientific survey I took the last couple of Barack Obama claims that earned a "Half True" to see just what it took to avoid being judged some shade of false. Non-spoiler alert - the results are what you expect, but sillier:

Do the fish swim in the streets of Miami at high tide, as Barack Obama said in Paris?

Huh? This came up in Paris as Obama exhorted the world on the importance of climate change. I'll skip the analysis and get to the ruling:

Our ruling

Obama said, "You go down to Miami and when it's flooding at high tide on a sunny day, fish are swimming through the middle of the streets."

This reminds us of the fishing stories you might hear from your uncle.

Fish have been seen (and videotaped) on the streets.

But that’s been in the low-lying areas that surround Miami, not on the streets in the city proper. And the sightings were during the more dramatic king tides, when high tides are at their highest, not during average daily high tides.

Overall, we rate his statement Half True.

Half true? I honestly believe that if I wrote to them with sufficient passion and conviction I could persuade them to change that to "True". Miami exists, it has streets, it is famously sunny, the tides change predictably, there must be fish around somewhere - I mean, ocean! C'mon, true is true.

Of course, over there in Realityville you might be thinking that if these fish are in the streets only at the semi-annual "king tides" and the streets in question aren't actually in Miami, well, some climate change advocates who hoped to combine some sun, fun and fish-watching on their trip to Miami are likely to feel, well, lied to. Seeing as how Miami generally has sunshine and high tides are a twice daily event, twice a year will be quite a let-down.

So let's see, it's mostly not true six days a year during king tides, when you have to hit the Miami burbs to see some fish in the street. It is totally false the rest of the year, sunshine and high tides notwithstanding.

So yeah, on a real scale this would be at best "mostly false".

But let's give Obama and his raters a second choice. The previous "Half True" was from June:

Barack Obama says U.S. today 'is the most respected country on Earth'

...

Our ruling

Obama said that today, "the United States is the most respected country on Earth."

International polling by Gallup has found that, in a reversal from the Bush era, the United States now finishes first compared to a limited group of countries -- Germany, China, Russia and the European Union. But a BBC poll that tested a broader group found the United States finishing in the middle of the pack, behind Germany, Canada, the United Kingdom, France, Japan, the European Union and Brazil.

We rate Obama’s claim Half True.

Again, do words have meaning? We are more respected than some important countries and less respected than others. Half True? Why even show up sober?

He’s referring to a provision in the Affordable Care Act called risk corridors, which faced a $2.5 billion shortfall for 2014. Rubio, whose efforts to repeal risk corridors have so far failed, helped persuade Congress last year to prevent Health and Human Services from being able to cover the difference with money from its own budget.

But experts said calling the program a bailout is not accurate. They also noted CMS has said they want the risk corridors to pay for themselves through fees from insurers.

Most importantly, experts also said Rubio did not necessarily save that money in the long run. His best argument is he temporarily limited one way CMS could have tried to pay for insurance companies' losses. The program has two more years to cover its expenses. If any bills are due after that time, CMS or Congress will have to find a way to pay them because they are obligated to do so.

Rubio oversimplified a complex process that is still largely unresolved. We rate his statement Mostly False.

In other words, its complicated, it may play out differently, too soon to tell, so false. Does something smell fishy here, or am I back on the streets of Miami at at high tide?

WASHINGTON — A little-noticed health care provision that Senator Marco Rubio of Florida slipped into a giant spending law last year has tangled up the Obama administration, sent tremors through health insurance markets and rattled confidence in the durability of President Obama’s signature health law.

Mr. Rubio says he “saved taxpayers $2.5 billion” — the difference between those two amounts — because his measure prevented the government from using other sources of money for the risk corridor payments.

The administration has repeatedly told insurers that it will explore other funding sources to keep its commitment to companies losing money in the exchanges, but Mr. Rubio effectively tied the hands of federal health officials this year.

Uhh, "Mostly False"? How is that not "Half True" if Obama's stories are? Why ask why.

So basically, PolitFact leans toward topics that might help their agenda and then puts their thumb on the scale when doing their DNC talking points assessment. Got it.

I have a time/task mismatch myself but I do want to zip through this NY Times article on Scalia's poorly articulated question about academic mismatch and affirmative action. There will be homework assigned, so get ready, and full speed ahead:

In an awkward exchange in Wednesday’s potentially game-changing Supreme Court arguments on affirmative action, Justice Antonin Scalia hesitantly asked whether it might be better for black students to go to “a slower-track school where they do well” than to go to a highly selective college, like the University of Texas, through some form of racial preference.

“I don’t think,” Mr. Scalia said, “it stands to reason that it’s a good thing for the University of Texas to admit as many blacks as possible.” He was addressing Gregory G. Garre, the lawyer defending the University of Texas at Austin’s affirmative action policy, which supplements the automatic admission of top-ranking students from all high schools across the state with the use of race as one factor in a “holistic” approach to admissions.

In asking such a pointed question, Mr. Scalia was stepping into a long debate over what has been called the mismatch theory of college admissions.

OK, it is interesting that Scalia was not a much more adept speaker (and the transcript does not bail him out; p. 66 ff). Anyone familiar with the argument knows he meant "some" black students, not all. (For simplicity I will operate in a black/white world, marginalizing Asians and Hispanics, but not for the first time). But Scalia surely knows the haters gonna hate. Of course, he also knows he has a lifetime appointment, so who's laughing now?

As to the theory:

The proponents of the “mismatch effect” say that large allowances based on a student’s race are harmful to those who receive them, that they learn less than they would if they attended a college more closely matched to their level of academic preparation, receive lower grades, become academically discouraged and socially segregated. Critics say that the “mismatch” research is based on flawed assumptions that cannot be validated by other researchers, and that the evidence is more likely to show that all students, regardless of race, benefit from enrolling at the most challenging college that will accept them.

We can work with that.

In layman’s terms, some see it as another form of the argument over whether getting a gentleman’s C at Harvard is better for one’s future than getting straight A’s at a lower-ranked university.

Ah, well. A second issue is whether discouraged students in over their heads drop to an easier major. So, a prospective scientist enters the STEM program at Harvard, is in over his head, and graduates with an Art Appreciation degree. His counterpart at Ohio State is in STEM classes that meet his background and abilities and graduates with a degree in computer science.

So is a Harvard art appreciation degree with a B average better or worse than a computer science degree with a b+ average fro OSU? And what does "better or worse" mean, anyway - earnings, life satisfaction, social network? Good luck answering that, let alone finding data.

But one issue is this - if (I say IF) students respond to academic mismatch by moving to an easier major, studies that looks exclusively at graduation rates are looking in the wrong place. We will revert to that.

Mr. Scalia’s comments drew a sharp response from Mr. Garre, the university’s lawyer. He said students admitted using their race as one of many criteria “fare better” academically over time than those admitted from the top 10 percent of every high school class, without regard to race.

And in remarks that seemed to allude to the now discredited “separate but equal” doctrine of education, Mr. Garre continued, “And frankly I don’t think the solution to the problems with student body diversity can be to set up a system in which not only are minorities going to separate schools, they’re going to inferior schools.”

Well, invoking "separate but equal" is just being inflammatory - colleges do sort their applicants in a way that local public schools do not.

As to the claim that the students admitted under ther Top Ten Percent program fare less well than their 'holistic' counterparts, I am surprised. From the transcript:

If you look at the academic performance of holistic minority admits versus the top 10 percent admits, over time, they ­­fare better.

OK, he said it. If he is comparing holistic minority admits versus Top Ten minority admits, I can rationalize it. The Top Ten program provides diversity because Texas public schools tend to be racially segregated by neighborhood. Its easy to imagine that a ten-percenter in an inner-city mostly black school could move to a wealthier lily-white suburban school and drop into the second quartile. Conversely, there might be in that mostly-white school a black kid in the 11-15th percentile who would be a much stronger college candidate than the inner-city kid.

So if both of them end up at UT, one by virtue of being a Ten Percenter and the second holistically, it would not be a surprise if the holistic minority admit outperformed his inner-city counterpart.

But is it likely that the group that missed the Ten percent cutoff outperforms everyone who passed that line? That would depend on who uses the Texas public schools:

During the 2014-15 school year, well over half of the state’s 5.2 million public school students were Hispanic. That’s up from 15 years ago, when about 40 percent of the state’s 4 million public school students were Hispanic. At the same time, the Asian student population doubled, but kids of Asian descent still make up a tiny portion — 4 percent — of the statewide student population.

Since the turn of the century, the white student population has plummeted by about a third — down from 43 percent of all students in 2000 to less than 29 percent during the last school year. Meanwhile, the black student population has remained largely the same, declining slightly in the past five years to less than 13 percent of the student population in the 2014-15 school year.

Well, ignoring Hispanics is ludicrous. part of the public school issue is 'white flight':

According to the voluntarily reported NCES data, about 57 percent of students enrolled in Texas private schools are white, 23 percent are Hispanic and six percent are black.

Well, OK - it may be that the public school system in Texas is so creaky that the holistic kids from the better schools outperform most of the kids from the majority of public schools. I'd like to dig up the numbers, and hope to soon.

Pressing on:

In the current case, Mr. Taylor is counsel on an amicus brief propounding the mismatch theory, on behalf of his co-author on that book, Richard Sander, a professor at the University of California, Los Angeles, law school. “Students who are admitted with far lower grades and test scores and other indicia of academic capability are almost certain to do badly academically, and we think, and this is more debatable, that they’re also likely to do worse in their careers and other departments of life than they would if they were getting good grades at some less prestigious school,” Mr. Taylor said.

He said the idea was not to reduce the number of black students going to college, but to admit them to schools where they would be more likely to succeed. “Martin Luther King didn’t go to a fancy college,” he said. “Thurgood Marshall didn’t go to a fancy college. Colin Powell didn’t go to a fancy college.”

OK.

Oren Sellstrom, one of the lawyers on a brief attacking the mismatch theory, said that “there is a vast body of social science evidence that shows exactly the opposite of what the mismatch theory purports to show, that actually minority students who benefit from affirmative action get higher grades at the institutions they attend, leave school at lower rates than others, and are generally more satisfied in higher education, and that attendance at a selective institution is associated with higher earnings and higher college completion rates.”

JEL is one of the flagship journals published by the American Economics Association; it generally publishes articles that try to synthesize knowledge in a field, rather than those with new results. Two years ago, JEL’s editors decided to commission an article on the “mismatch” (or “peer effects”) debate. Recognizing that this was an unusually controversial issue, the article was to be written by two economists with differing starting positions: Peter Arcidiacono, a Duke economist who has published several important studies on mismatch, and Mike Lovenheim, a Cornell economist who was skeptical about mismatch. When the authors completed a draft, JEL sent it to seven diverse peer reviewers — an unusually large number — to ensure the draft was critically examined. All seven recommended publication. JEL has a queue, but the article will probably appear in the next issue.

Given this process, it should not be surprising that the resulting article — “Affirmative Action and the Quality-Fit Tradeoff” — does not take thundering positions on any of the outstanding issues. Indeed, it finds that on many of the most important questions raised by the mismatch hypothesis, the available data is too scattered and too poor in quality to reach clear conclusions. Moreover, since the authors find there are “positive average effects of college quality” on a host of outcomes, any mismatch effect has to be large enough to outweigh these advantages. Nonetheless, the authors find persuasive evidence that such mismatch effects occur, particularly in law school and in science education.

We are slowly building towards the interesting stuff. Back to mismatch critics:

Mr. Sellstrom called the mismatch theory “paternalistic,” and said that the concern Mr. Scalia’s remarks raised for him was that, “At root he does not believe that students of color belong at elite institutions. I hope that’s not the case, but the tenor of the remarks certainly suggests that that is underlying his thinking.”

At first blush, economists should be very skeptical of the mismatch hypothesis. After all, affirmative action just expands the choice set. If an individual believes a particular school would be too difficult, then the individual could simply attend another school. By revealed preference, the individual must be better off.

Ahh, but do we know enough to make informed choices?

Yet, even in the context of rational expectations, where student beliefs are right on average given their information sets, there are cases where under-represented groups could be made better off in the absence of affirmative action. This comes about because schools may have private information about match quality but are letting in lower match quality students in order to satisfy diversity goals. Thus, the information sets of both schools and students are the critical components in driving mismatch.

They also note that students are never told they are under-qualified but were accepted on a preference. Athletes generally know this, and students with a certain self-awareness might accurately guess. But Harvard is under pressure to meet their numbers achieve certain diversity goals, so they won't be telling candidates they are pretty marginal.

Well. In the context of big ticket decisions such as buying a home, Elizabeth Warren Democrats throw consumer sovereignty right out the window. Odd that they seem to respect the notion here. One might argue that if the DoE required colleges to disgorge a lot more data on enrollments, preferential dmissions, departmental and major transfers, and the like - the grist for these economists mill, in other words - consumer sovereignty could be protected and enhanced.

The Feds got more collegiate assault expulsions when they asked for it - I bet they could get this data overnight, if Team Obama was not in a Don't Ask, Don't tell modality on this topic.

The Ties closes with a heart-warming but utterly atypical example:

Christle Nwora, 21, a senior at the University of Texas and a member of its Black Student Alliance, was admitted because she was in the top 10 percent of students at Plano East Senior High School. She is a humanities major, and in a program that will send her to medical school in the fall. She said prestige had been a factor in her decision to go there.

“I think it goes to the value of my degree,” she said. “It’s one of the most recognizable college brands. We have a strong alumni network, which ranges all across the world.”

More power to her. Plano East Senior High School is in roughly the top third of public schools in Texas; Plano itself is a prosperous mostly-white city outside of Dallas. Since you didn't ask, the Plano East Senior High racial makeup is:

Don't tell me truth actually got its boots on - the WaPo Fact Checkers join the LA Times and Slate (Bouie, Posner) in questioning the No-Fly/Terrorist Watchlist three-card monte being played by Democrats.

December 10, 2015

Rare is the day when we find a smidgen of insight at Vox. Rarer still is the day that the Voxsplainers and Glenn Reynolds are aligned in agreement.

This is that day. Glenn, picking up a theme noted by Sen. Ben Sasse in San Bernardino, explains that the river of BS flowing from Washington has lifted Trump's boat. Well, with better metaphors:

Glenn Reynolds: Liberals have chosen The Donald as their 'Destructor'

Glenn Harlan Reynolds 10:23 a.m. EST December 9, 2015

Weak and ineffectual leadership created the vacuum Trump is filling.

...And Obama’s public statements have seemed weak and mired in PC, even as many Americans grow increasingly worried about Islamic terrorism. As Josh Kraushaar wrote in National Journal, “Demo­crats are at risk of polit­ic­ally mar­gin­al­iz­ing them­selves on na­tion­al se­cur­ity in the run-up to the 2016 pres­id­en­tial elec­tion, ca­ter­ing to a base that seems dis­con­nec­ted from the grow­ing anxi­ety that the pub­lic feels over the threat from Is­lam­ic ter­ror­ism. ... The signs of a pres­id­ent in deni­al over the threat of ter­ror­ism keep pil­ing up.”

Enter Donald Trump. People who are unhappy with the things Trump is saying need to understand that he’s only getting so much traction because he’s filling a void. If the responsible people would talk about these issues, and take action, Trump wouldn’t take up so much space.

And there’s a lesson for our ruling class there: Calling Trump a fascist is a bit much (fascism, as Tom Wolfe once reported, is forever descending upon the United States, but somehow it always lands on Europe), but movements like fascism and communism get their start because the mechanisms of liberal democracy seem weak and ineffectual and dishonest. If you don’t want Trump — or, perhaps, some post-Trump figure who really is a fascist — to dominate things, you need to stop being weak and ineffectual and dishonest.

That gives a pass to the Republican establishment that can't seem to tell the truth about their immigration aspirations, but yes - out in flyover country the bitter-clingers don't have a lot of confidence in Washington politicians.

Yeah yeah, more progressive catnip. Amazing how progressive social scientists write studies reviewed by progressive peers and they always come out the same way.

Twitter was helpful in alerting the Voxies to various Dem conspiracies. Movie recommendations included Fahrenheit 911, the Valerie Plame flick and the Dan Rather flick. 911 "Truthers", anti-vaxxers, and many others were noted.

But it was a clickbait headline anyway - the study notes that both parties are subject to this, with shifts depending very much on who is in and who is out:

However, they are careful to acknowledge that there are alternative explanations for the asymmetry that they cannot (yet) rule out. Perhaps conservative conspiracy theories are simply easier to believe. Perhaps they are more salient at the moment (liberal CTs mostly date back to the Bush era). Perhaps the fact that there is a Democratic president in office has made conservatives more prone to CTs, and the effect would be reversed under a Republican president. Perhaps conservatives are just taking their cues from elites, who are more likely to push CTs when a Democrat is in power.

The Republicans also get praise for their more elaborate and well-argued conspiracy theories, or something - anyway, we are offered the reassurance that the Dems are the Stupid(er) Party:

What's more, the conservative base is, relative to the broader electorate, more politically engaged and intense, which means its members are likely to pay more attention and have more knowledge (or at least "knowledge") about political events. By contrast, many of the demographics that make up the unwieldy left coalition are somewhat disengaged, less likely to consume partisan media, donate to candidates, or even vote.

And because we know so much but trust no one...

Low-trust, high-knowledge conservatives are a breeding ground for CTs, and more and more conservatives are low trust and high knowledge.

Are those my ears burning? Yes they are!

Normally I would say "Read it all", but honestly? This was their conclusion:

The research suggests that there is only one way to mitigate or reverse this process: restore some level of trust in the US political system. But conservative elites — who have the ear of their base — have no incentive to do so, and it's not clear that anyone else has ability to do so. Declining trust in institutions is broad and deep in America; it may very well be unstoppable. As long as it continues, conspiracy theories will play a larger and larger role in public life.

That is giving Obama a pass and blaming the Republican elites, although it is not clear who that may be since earlier we learned - brace yourself...

the conservative base tends to scorn all professional politicians, including those in the Republican establishment.

Maybe Rush could stem the Trump tide? His failure to do so isn't "incentives", it's more likely beliefs.

But at least we have a common diagnosis - leadership is faltering.

Let me add - Trump caught fire with immigration, which can be laid at the feet of a cryptic Chamber of Commerce "cheap labor" Republican establishment in an unholy alliance with the Democratic "more votes, screw the unskilled natives" side. But Obama didn't help bring the country together with his novel (and so far blocked) Executive Actions on immigration.

After some utterly appropriate Obama-bashing he gets to the main point:

First, many of those voters lived through the George W. Bush presidency, when a Republican president combined an idealistic attempt to spread democracy in the Muslim world by force of arms with a firm repudiation of any suggestion that Islam writ large might be a problem. And they remember that this strategy did not exactly seem to reap the desired results.

Second, those voters know from long experience that whatever leading Republican politicians say about immigration and border security, many of them have similar views to, well, Barack Obama: They favor more immigration and less enforcement, and they privately (or not-so-privately) regard anyone who disagrees as a knuckle-dragging nativist.

This includes, again, the last Republican president — on whose watch, as not a few voters still remember, the most spectacular terrorist attack in American history was carried out by a group of men who were here entirely legally, most of them on visas from a country that’s officially one of our closest allies in the Muslim world.

So then you combine those two issues in a presidential campaign, and your party’s leadership (the new speaker of the House, Paul Ryan, very much included) consists of figures who basically still believe in Bush’s approach to both national security and immigration, and the presidential candidates with the clearest support from the Republican establishment are either Marco Rubio (who sounds Bush-esque on foreign policy and tried to pass a comprehensive immigration bill with Chuck Schumer) or Jeb Bush (I repeat, Jeb Bush) … well, you can understand why at least some Republicans (the less ideologically committed, more disaffected sort, especially) feel like they’re being offered something they’ve seen tried already, and why the party’s promise to improve on Obama’s record seems less authoritative and more like another bill of goods.

A Colorado ACLU co-chair wants people to exercise their gun-ownership rights by shooting Trump voters. Doesn't seem so civil. Let's brace ourselves for the outrage.

Not to get myself started, but since the topic seems to be "Lefty hypocrisy du jour", I am still steaming about the 'coverage' of Scalia's question about the mismatch theory as it relates to undergrad admissions and Affirmative Action. A sampler is from Mother Jones:

No he really didn't. The mismatch theory has been around a while and even progressives still read The Atlantic (I think...).

And that deliberately obtuse and inflammatory clickbait comes from Ms. Mencimer, from whose bio we glean that she is a "graduate of a crappy public university not worth mentioning". [Yes, the Beach Boys sob.] Given her seeming success one might think she would be a bit more open to the value of attending a less prestigious school. Of course, given her apparent sensitivity to racial slights real or imagined, one might not expect to read this at her Twitter site:

Utah native, DC transplant. Not Mormon.

There's a religious test at Mother Jones? Or is that a DC thing?

And now I can finally rebut my friend who insists that anti-Catholicism is the last socially acceptable bigotry in this country.

Well, now that my eyes are opened I'll have to start checking to see how often I notice "Not Jewish" or "Not Catholic". Grrr.

Here we go - righties, put down those freedom fries and pick up some French fries. Lefties, find a new country to admire. Sacre bleu!

Three mosques shut down in anti-terror raids as officers seize 330 war weapons

POLICE investigating the Paris terror attacks have shut down three mosques in a series of raids to close the net on Islamic extremists.

Police in France also arrested the owner of a revolver found during Wednesday's raid, France's Interior Minister Bernard Cazeneuve said.

Security officials found jihadist documents at the mosque where yesterday's raids took place.

They have placed nine people under house arrest. Another 22 have been banned from leaving the country Mr Cazeneuve said.

France has been under a state of emergency since 130 people were killed in a series of terror attacks in Paris on November 13. Since then, some 2,235 homes and buildings have been raided, 232 people taken into custody, and 334 weapons confiscated.

Cazeneuve said the number of weapons apprehended so far is staggering.

He said: "In 15 days we have seized one-third of the quantity of war-grade weapons that are normally seized in a year."

Weird. In France, the authorities are taking guns from real or imagined jihadists. In this country, Obama wants to take guns from law-abiding citizens. Somebody is going about this the wrong way.

December 09, 2015

Just be ready - you will not see a funnier display of zero self-awareness today, this year, or perhaps ever. This is from a NY Times op-ed:

Diversity Makes You Brighter

...

Diversity improves the way people think. By disrupting conformity, racial and ethnic diversity prompts people to scrutinize facts, think more deeply and develop their own opinions. Our findings show that such diversity actually benefits everyone, minorities and majority alike.

OMG, LOL, and WTF. This explains why the NY Times newsroom is filled with reporters who are evangelical Christians, pro-lifers, gun owners, climate change skeptics, and white-bread New England conservatives. Oh, wait. It's not a diversity of ideas that promote broader thinking - its a diversity of skin tone! My bad.

To be fair, this article is not promoting workplace diversity. I actually have a second punchline - it is promoting Affirmative Action to bring diversity to our nation's campuses! That's right, our campuses, those bastions of free speech where competing ideas are bandied about without fear of consequences. As long as you are in the designated Campus Free Speech Zone at an allowed time and with the proper permit - otherwise some representative of diverse ethnicity, sexuality, religion, or whatever may take offense at your diverse ideas and you'll be be learning what 'hasta la vista' means.

Available only as an e-book, for a mere 99 cents - waaay less than a double grande half-caf mocha latte with something or other to top it off - this can be yours! The narrator is a young woman in the workforce so its a quick light read for, well, young ladies of the middle-school to college persuasion. Or their parents. Ok, maybe even a grandparent. Probably not teen age boys, if that helps. Happy Holidays.

SINCE YOU DIDN'T ASK: Full disclosure? That is what the JOM sleuths are for!

During our courtship my (then-future) wife and I talked about how many kids we might want, but this never came up:

WASHINGTON — The F.B.I. director, James B. Comey, said Wednesday that the couple who waged a shooting rampage in San Bernardino, Calif., last week had been talking of an attack as far back as two years ago, while they were still dating.

“Our investigation to date shows that they were radicalized before they started courting or dating each other online,” Mr. Comey said, “and as early as the end of 2013 were talking to each other about jihad and martyrdom before they became engaged and married and were living in the U.S.”

We welcome diversity in this country and its great that Obama's crack vetting procedures don't actually discourage a range of viewpoints or behaviors.

And I am picturing the happy couple on a moonlit walk - "Do you see yourself going out with guns blazing or are you more the suicide bomber type?".

Two weeks ago, I was in Kuwait participating in an I.M.F. seminar for Arab educators. For 30 minutes, we discussed the impact of technology trends on education in the Middle East. And then an Egyptian education official raised his hand and asked if he could ask me a personal question: “I heard Donald Trump say we need to close mosques in the United States,” he said with great sorrow. “Is that what we want our kids to learn?”

No peeking - take a moment to guess what he said. Now I'll take a moment to guess what he didn't say:

Troubling, isn't it? The United States was founded by people fleeing religious persecution. Religious freedom is a bedrock principle of our Constitution and our society. Today the United States is one of the most open, tolerant and diverse societies in history. Yet even with that history we seem to be having a problem with Muslims. If that makes you and your kids wonder whether the problem is with the United States, or with something about Islamic teachings that makes it hard for Muslims to co-exist with other religions, well, that might be a helpful discussion for you to have.

I know, right? we know that didn't happen. If Mr. Friedman had a sufficiently firm grip on his listener's lapels he might even have continued with this:

Here's something else your kids may not know about the United States. During World War Two we rounded up and put in camps over 100,000 Japanese, the majority of whom were American citizens! We killed about one hundred thousand Japanese civilians by firebombing their capital, then wrapped up the war by dropping not one but two nuclear bombs on Japan. Yet today Japan is one of our staunchest allies and the Japanese are one of the most successful ethnic groups in America. So attitudes can change - on both sides.

OK, that conversation will never happen either. Let's go live:

I tried to assure him that Trump would not be our next president — that America’s commitment to pluralism runs deep.

Yeah, it's us, not them. However, several paragraphs later Mr. Friedman removes his head from the sand which is no doubt plentiful in that part of the world and admits that maybe it's them. His description of how to defeat ISIS and its ideological appeal includes this (my emphasis):

...stress that while we know that the violent jihadists are a minority among Muslims, the notion that they’re a totally separate and distinct group is not true. ISIS ideology comes directly out of the most puritanical, anti-pluralistic Salafist school of Islam, which promotes a lot of hostility toward “the other” — Shiites, Jews, Hindus, Christians. Clearly, some people are taking permission and inspiration from this puritanical Islam to murder and sow mayhem. I can’t reform it, but a movement of Muslims must, because it is isolating their whole community.

There are some good signs. NPR reported Monday that “when a man wielding a knife stabbed three people at an East London subway stop on Saturday evening and shouted, ‘This is for Syria,’ as he was being handcuffed … an onlooker yelled, ‘You ain’t no Muslim, bruv!’ using slang akin to ‘bro.’ ‘You’re no Muslim. You ain’t no Muslim,’ he repeated.” The man who made the statement has not been identified, but the hashtag ‘#YouAintNoMuslimBruv’ began trending worldwide,” no doubt propelled by Muslims. That’s what we need more of.

That is so seemingly obvious that even Obama, who in the past has insisted that ISIS has nothing to do with Islam, now explains (somewhat paradoxically, but he is a Deep Thinker) that Muslims need to reform from within. This is from his recent attempt to make us re-rank Carter's 'malaise' speech:

Here's what else we cannot do. We cannot turn against one another by letting this fight be defined as a war between America and Islam. That, too, is what groups like ISIL want. ISIL does not speak for Islam. They are thugs and killers, part of a cult of death, and they account for a tiny fraction of more than a billion Muslims around the world -- including millions of patriotic Muslim Americans who reject their hateful ideology. Moreover, the vast majority of terrorist victims around the world are Muslim.

If we're to succeed in defeating terrorism we must enlist Muslim communities as some of our strongest allies, rather than push them away through suspicion and hate. That does not mean denying the fact that an extremist ideology has spread within some Muslim communities. This is a real problem that Muslims must confront, without excuse. Muslim leaders here and around the globe have to continue working with us to decisively and unequivocally reject the hateful ideology that groups like ISIL and al Qaeda promote; to speak out against not just acts of violence, but also those interpretations of Islam that are incompatible with the values of religious tolerance, mutual respect, and human dignity.

Sadly and perhaps surprisingly that represents real progress. Go back a year to Obama's address in Sept 2014 when he outlined his strategy to "degrade and ultimately destroy" ISIS. There is no challenge to the Muslim community here or abroad to take on the jihadist version of Islam. Instead, we got this:

Now let’s make two things clear: ISIL is not “Islamic.” No religion condones the killing of innocents. And the vast majority of ISIL’s victims have been Muslim.... ISIL is a terrorist organization, pure and simple.

That left as a Frequently Unanswered Question why it was that "a terrorist organization, pure and simple" was successfully recruiting radical Islamic jihadists from around the world, and what might be done about it. A year later, Obama is finally willing to acknowledge the obvious.

December 08, 2015

In a conversation inspired by the rantings of The Donald several experts [Posner, Volokh, Gershman of the WSJ, Krikorian of NRO] have opined that the President's power to bar Muslims is probably Constitutional. Interesting.. One takeaway is that, at a minimum, Trumps critics who insist his proposal is blatantly, transparently unconstitutional are overstating the simplicity of the issue.

Hmm. If I had to bet on myself over Prof. Volokh I would back the Prof almost every time. Almost!

But my position is that if the President imposed a ban on Muslims based on a religious test (not, for example, country of origin or national security screening) then Muslim-Americans would sue and win.

Their first argument would be that family reunification has been a cornerstone of US immigration policy, which means they are being denied equal protection for religious reasons. Find someone whose (sympathetic) mother or daughter is still an alien abroad, gain standing, win.

Their second claim is that restricting entry based on religion may put the US on a road to establishing a de facto Christian-Judeo state religion simply by excluding alternative religions.

The Supreme Court Justices will think about America's history as a beacon of religious freedom, ponder the reputations of the bright lights that gave us Dred Scott and Korematsu, and find for the plaintiffs.

My bet, anyway.

WAFFLING QUIBBLING: Family reunification is the current US policy but it could be changed. The plaintiffs might win given current US policy but changing the policy so that they won't win might not be that difficult. In which case, is it fair to say they won on the basis of Constitutional protections?

Or is that too abstract? To switch gears, suppose the Feds and the states fulfilled the libertarian dream and got completely out of the marriage racket, performing only secular civil unions. Gays would then be eligible for unions but (I presume) lose their right to gay "marriages", since religious organizations cannot be compelled to perform them.

But no one is arguing that gays didn't win on the basis of a Constitutional right.

This can be overthought. Trump is energizing his base, not expanding it, and the last man (or woman!) standing will beat him.

OKAY, REALLY WAFFLING: My legal objections would amount to nothing if Trump announced a six month moratorium on Muslim immigration pending new guidelines. And per Krikorian he certainly seems to have statutory authority. Hmmph...

Ken White is brilliant on the stale gun "debate" and why both sides talk past each other.

I should add - as with the abortion debate, every square inch is bitterly contested because each side believes (correctly, IMHO) that the other side is trying to establish principles today that can expanded tomorrow, and neither side wants to be shoved down a slippery slope.

So one reason either debate (guns or abortion) typically degenerates into a screaming match is that calm conversation amongst the moderates makes the more extreme faction very nervous. Just my guess.

And an obvious objection to that theory in the current context - it is Obama and the other gun controllers that immediately defaulted to silly (at least, judging by Obama's loss of the LA Times and Slate; by my theory, it should have been the gun control opponents who started the shouting.

THE DOG THAT DID NOTHING IN THE NIGHT: The LA Times makes the same point I did, so I am allowed a quick victory twirl:

It is worth noting that the terrorist-list proposal would not have affected the San Bernardino attackers because neither of them was on the watch list, at least as far as has been reported. And although backers of the measure cite Government Accountability Office data that show more than 2,000 people on the list bought firearms from 2004 to 2014, there's no available information on whether any of those weapons have been used in a crime, let alone an act of terrorism.

First, avoid it? I say, embrace it! Spoiler alert - ISIS wants to die at Dabiq and we want to kill them. This article also bolsters my hope that the US military is kicking the concepts around.

Back to the Times:

As the debate on how best to contain the Islamic State continues to rage in Western capitals, the militants themselves have made one point patently clear: They want the United States and its allies to be dragged into a ground war.

In fact, when the United States first invaded Iraq, one of the most enthusiastic proponents of the move was the man who founded the terrorist cell that would one day become the Islamic State, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi. He excitedly called the Americans’ 2003 intervention “the Blessed Invasion.”

His reaction — ignored by some, and dismissed as rhetoric by others — points to one of the core beliefs motivating the terrorist group now holding large stretches of Iraq and Syria: The group bases its ideology on prophetic texts stating that Islam will be victorious after an apocalyptic battle to be set off once Western armies come to the region.

Should that invasion happen, the Islamic State would not only be able to declare its prophecy fulfilled, but could also turn the occurrence into a new recruiting drive at the very moment when the terror group appears to be losing volunteers.

Yes, but they would also have to meet us at their prophesied battlefield or risk crushing their recruiting.

It is partly that theory that President Obama referred to in his speech on Sunday, when he said the United States should pursue a “sustainable victory” that involves airstrikes and supports local forces battling the Islamic State rather than sending a new generation of American soldiers into a ground offensive.

Ahh, wait - are they reporting that Obama is making policy based on these prophecies? That's good, because normally its hard to discuss nutty prophecies without sounding nutty. But if it's good enough for Obama... well, never mind that - it is now a mainstream idea.

Over to their expert:

“I have said it repeatedly: Because of these prophecies, going in on the ground would be the worst trap to fall into. They want troops on the ground. Because they have already envisioned it,” said Jean-Pierre Filiu, a professor of Middle East Studies at Sciences Po in Paris, and the author of “Apocalypse in Islam,” one of the main scholarly texts exploring the scripture that the militants base their ideology on.

“It’s a very powerful and emotional narrative. It gives the potential recruit and the actual fighters the feeling that not only are they part of the elite, they are also part of the final battle.”

Oh, please, some Frenchman. Very impressive resume, but has he ever put his life in another man's hands? Asked him to put his life in his? I don't think so. If we can pick the time and place of the final battle (dabiq is roughly twenty miles south of the Turkish border in Syria, in an area being considered as a possible refugee safe haven anyway), why not let ISIS come to us? Or let them duck us and we can engage in Apocalyptic Taunting on social media. Making ISIS look less than invincible will be a win for the West.

The Islamic State’s propaganda is rife with references to apocalyptic prophecy about the last great battle that sets the stage for the end times. Terrorism experts say it has become a powerful recruiting tool for the group, also known as ISIS or ISIL, which sells potential fighters on the promise that joining will give them the most direct chance to battle Western interests and will bring ancient Islamic prophecies to fruition.

The specific scripture they are referring to describes a battle in Dabiq as well as al-Amaq, small towns that still exist in northern Syria. The countdown to the apocalypse begins once the “Romans” — a term that militants have now conveniently expanded to include Americans and their allies — set foot in Dabiq.

Last year, when Islamic State militants beheaded the American hostage Peter Kassig, a former United States Army Ranger, they made sure to do it in Dabiq.

“Here we are, burying the first American crusader in Dabiq, eagerly waiting for the remainder of your armies to arrive,” the executioner announced.

Dabiq is now the name of the Islamic State’s monthly online magazine, and each successive issue continues to hammer home the notion of the looming doomsday battle.

I don't know what we gain by disappointing them. Back to our French expert:

Regardless of a ground intervention’s potential to succeed, some veteran analysts caution that the act of invasion would play handily into the group’s prophetic vision.

“To break the dynamic, you have to debunk the prophecy,” Mr. Filiu said. “You need to do so via a military defeat, like taking over Raqqa. But it needs to be by local forces — by Sunni Arabs.”

Obviously he knows a lot more about this than I do. But I would really like a clear explanation of why an appearance at Dabiq by "the Army of Rome" would be overlooked by ISIS, or why we would lose an ensuing battle. Some explanation more convincing than Obama's talk of a war-weary public or a years-long occupation, please. From CNN:

Poll: Most Americans say send ground troops to fight ISIS

For the first time in CNN/ORC polling, a majority of Americans (53%) say the U.S. should send ground troops to Iraq or Syria to fight ISIS. At the same time, 6-in-10 disapprove of the President's handling of terrorism and 68% say America's military response to the terrorist group thus far has not been aggressive enough.

As an American I am a big believer in quick fixes and silver bullets. Let's hear from another expert:

Proponents of a ground assault argue that an even bigger recruiting drive than the militants’ end-of-times prophecy is their promise of an Islamic state.

“They actually, it seems to me, have two objectives,” said Jessica Stern, one of the authors of the book “ISIS: The State of Terror.” “One is to goad us into a ground war. And the other is to run a state, and they are contradictory.”

Although I had been following the evolution of AQI into ISIS over the last eight years, after I was commissioned to write a short book on the topic I dug a bit deeper into the group’s motivations. Not surprisingly, Iraq’s devolution into a sectarian state has played a significant role in ISIS’s strength and ability to recruit. Here is what surprised me most: Like Zarqawi, but even more so, ISIS is obsessed with the apocalypse. Its sectarian killing and even its sexual enslavement of “polytheist” women is partly dictated, or so it says, by its preparation for the final apocalyptic battle, which it anticipates will take place in the Syrian town of Dabiq. Thus, ISIS conquered that town, and named its online English-language magazine after it, even though Dabiq was of limited strategic value.

There are times when giving the terrorists what they want can overlap with just what we want.

The meadow outside the small village of Dabiq, Syria is a strange setting for one of the final battles of the Islamic apocalypse. Although close to the Turkish border, “Dabiq is not important militarily” observed a leader in the Syria opposition. And yet the Islamic State fought ferociously to capture the village this summer because its members believe the great battle between infidels and Muslims will take place there as part of the final drama preceding the Day of Judgment.

In a prophecy attributed to Muhammad, the Prophet predicts the Day of Judgment will come after the Muslims defeat Rome at al-`Amaq or Dabiq, two places close to the Syrian border with Turkey. Another prophecy holds that Rome’s allies will number 80. The Muslims will then proceed to conquer Constantinople (Istanbul).

WASHINGTON — The bloody attack in San Bernardino, Calif., last week revived fears about threats from groups such as the Islamic State in America and also fused two fraught policy debates central to the presidential contest: gun control and how far to go in the fight against terrorism.

With domestic gun violence becoming increasingly common, Democrats have used the latest attack, apparently by supporters of the Islamic State, to frame the issue as a matter of national security. The tactic has put Republican presidential candidates on the spot and created some fissures within the field as those seeking the nomination try to balance defending Second Amendment rights and protecting the public.

On Sunday night, President Obama called for new restrictions that would prevent suspects who are on no-fly lists from getting access to guns, forcing Republicans to explain why potential terrorists should be able to buy weapons of war.

“What could possibly be the argument for allowing a terrorist suspect to buy a semiautomatic weapon?” Mr. Obama asked in a prime-time address to the nation. “This is a matter of national security.”

What could be the reason for allowing a person on the terrorist watch-list to have private meetings in his home? To make unmonitored telephone calls? I don't know - the Bill of Rights maybe. Innocent until proven guilty. Due process. Or we could have government by Executive Branch secret lists and no judicial oversight. Whatever.

I do feel obliged to mention again this April 2014 NY Times editorial denouncing the no-fly list, which was vexing a Muslim professor. Perhaps Democrats now think most of the people on the no-fly list are creepy white Christians? Life is so full of surprises, but based simply on similar names, misspelled names and suspicious countries of travel I, for one, won't be surprised if Muslims are over-represented on the no-fly list. I imagine Times editors will be horrified that Muslims can't arm themselves against the impending backlash.

In any case, the Times noodles about the political vise in which they imagine the Republicans are being squeezed. However, there is no mention in the current article, in their recent editorial on our cowardly Senate, or in articles that made their Dead Tree editions about the Republican alternative to the Feinstein no-fly gun ban. That said they are currently hosting an AP article that includes this:

By 54-45, senators voted down a proposal by Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., that would let the government bar sales to people it suspects of being terrorists. Though she initially introduced the proposal early this year, it received attention after last month's attacks in Paris.

Minutes earlier, the Senate killed a rival plan by Sen. John Cornyn, R-Texas, that would let the government delay firearms sales to suspected terrorists for up to 72 hours. Under that proposal, the transaction could be halted permanently during that waiting period if federal officials could persuade a judge to do so.

Senators voted 55-44 for Cornyn's proposal, but it needed 60 votes to pass.

To counter Feinstein’s amendment, Senate Majority Whip John Cornyn (R-Texas) proposed a measure that would give the attorney general the power to impose a 72-hour delay for individuals on the terror watch list seeking to purchase a gun and it could become a permanent ban if a judge determines there is probable cause during that time window.

Cornyn argued that Feinstein’s amendment was “un-American” and violated individuals’ constitutional rights by potentially preventing someone mistakenly on the terror watch list from purchasing a firearm.

I have more on the due process protections of the Cornyn amendment in this earlier post. I am still unclear as to what the Democratic objections to this measure might be, or whether the process that Cornyn proposes would defy implementation.

In a different world the Times might, in the course of analyzing the Republicans political peril, have noted that the Republicans had cobbled together something they were willing to vote for and which appeared superficially plausible while providing due process protections. Instead, this Cornyn idea has never happened. I don't know what that means - is the Cornyn amendment so transparently unserious that the Times can't waste a sentence on it, or is it sufficiently plausible idea so actually trying to spin Democratic objections might be difficult? I have noted elsewhere that there might be plausible time and national security concerns. Three days might be quick, and the DoJ won't be disclosing information based on confidential informers to the suspect. Still, we have judicial oversight of wiretapping based on CI intel and judges bang out warrants to search homes day and night, or so I glean from Law and Order.

Beats me. FWIW, Sen Ayotte (R-NH) was talking up the amendment today and getting hammered by righties on Twitter, not to mention Democrats elsewhere, so time may tell. And here we go as to substantive objections to the Cornyn process:

But the swing-state senator, who's facing a tough reelection battle, wasn't referring to the legislation Democrats have rallied around and President Obama is calling for. She was instead talking about a watered down alternate Republicans had offered for political cover.

...

That legislation would allow the attorney general to impose a 72-hour delay for people on the terror watch list seeking to purchase a gun which could then become permanent if a judge determines in that narrow time window that the person shouldn’t be able to access guns. But Democrats complain that it wouldn’t be hard for people to tie things up in the courts for that span — and just like with background checks which have similar rules, bad people would be able to buy guns because the government doesn’t move fast enough.

The terror watch list has been plagued by having too many people who aren’t terrorists on it, though the Democrat-backed legislation also makes it easier for people to be able to get themselves removed from the list.

Whoa, the Daily News is miles ahead of the Times here. In the earlier post I had noted that we may be talking about roughly 200 requests per year, so maybe the government could plan on picking up the pace. Or maybe three days could be stretched to three business days. It is barely possible that sweet reason could prevail here, if we ever actually talk about it.

FULL OF SOUND AND FURY: The Times' conclusion:

The Department of Homeland Security did not immediately comment on the list, but a former senior counterterrorism official, speaking on the condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to discuss the matter, pointed out that the no-fly list is a small subset of the overall watch list of more than a million people, and that it is carefully vetted.

“The silliness of objecting to restricting gun purchases by people on the no-fly is exceeded only by how limited that step would be,” the former official said.

The reassuring phrase he sought was "unbelievably small". And of course the debate is only silly when viewed in isolation. As with the abortion debate, each square inch is contested bitterly because one side is attempting to establish a principal they can later expand and the other is trying to avoid being shoved down a slippery slope.

And do let's note - the Times reassurance here is based on the smaller "no-fly list" but Democrats have been hazy - apparently deliberately so - as to whether they mean the smaller no-fly list or the much larger Terrorist Watchlist.

General Keane, architect of the Bush surge in Iraq, lays out a plan for battling ISIS. He calls for a mimimum of 10,000 troops, but where they are meant to come from is unclear; I will come back to that.

Let me highlight this, among his suggestions:

Establish Safe Zones in NW Syria along the Turkish border and in SW Syria along the Jordanian border for refugees. Protect on the ground with an international force. Protect from the air using coalition air power and with Jordanian and Turkish missile defense on their side of the border.

Gen. Keane is not even hinting that he hopes to spark an ISIS apocalypse by meeting them in Dabiq. Dabiq is a logical area to establish a safe haven. His suggestion of "an international force" is utterly reasonable, and the fact that ISIS awaits a showdown with "the Army of Rome" under 80 flags is again undoubtedly a coincidence.

That said, if we get lucky and accidentally prompt ISIS to engage in a major showdown at Dabiq, well, wasn't it noted socialist Lefty Gomez who opined that he would rather be lucky than good? Gen. Keane is a smart guy which means he is smart enough to know that describing any plan which relies on the enemy being crazy will probably sound crazy. On the other hand, there is this from a recent Newsweek piece which discusses ISIS as an apocalyptic cult:

Ignorance of ISIS is also driving calls for simplistic military solutions. This relates to the group’s belief in the End Times. In 2014, ISIS waged a bitter fight against other Sunni Muslims to gain control of Dabiq, a Syrian town of no strategic significance. Yet it is there, according to an Islamic prophecy, that the battle against the antichrist will be fought. And now, as more countries join the fight against ISIS, its members cheer—believing the prophecy comes ever closer that 80 flags (nations) will gather in Dabiq to wage war, with Jesus leading Muslims to victory.

...

Why is this important? Because it tells us ISIS fighters will not run from a military confrontation; they crave it. Its members do not fear death in battle; they pray for it. American politicians who proclaim they will terrify ISIS with their commitment to fight do not understand what motivates the enemy.

...

Fortunately, even if the politicians do not understand ISIS, military strategists do. In 2014, government strategists from more than 30 countries gathered at MacDill Air Force Base. There, according to two military officers who attended, the group engaged in “red teaming,” which involves anticipating what the enemy will do. The issue of the End Times was discussed, as was the fact that the prospect of death would not frighten ISIS fighters.

They aren't afraid to die and we aren't afraid to kill them. A win-win.

WHOSE TROOPS?

At one point in the presentation Keane writes this:

Step up U.S. military activities in Iraq and Syria:

Once and for all send the required advisors, trainers, air controllers that are truly needed to dramatically increase IA, Sunni tribal force and Kurdish Peshmerga combat effectiveness. The output should be at least three times greater.

...

--Troops required is a minimum of 10K.

Identify combat brigades for potential deployment but held in reserve and only committed if all else fails.

But a bit later:

Now is not the time to commit U.S. combat brigades to Iraq or Syria. But if necessary, at some future date, it should be a part of a regional Arab and NATO coalition.

Maybe it was made clear in his testimony, but the 10,000 troops seems to be in the "Step Up US" section so I infer he is describing US troops. Is he talking about 6,000 advisors, trainers, Special Op air controllers, logistics support, and so on, and a 4,000 man brigade held in reserve?

The Cornyn amendment was offered by Republicans as an alternative to the Feinstein amendment. Here is a WaPo description of both:

The Senate rejected a measure... from Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) to prevent individuals on the terror watch list from purchasing firearms on a 45 to 54 vote. The amendments were offered to an Obamacare repeal package currently being debated in the Senate and they needed 60 votes to be adopted.

Pretty cursory, but Prof. Volokh has more here, and his theme is an utter disregard for due process. I am not a parliamentarian but the 60 votes were apparently needed to suspend a rule and consider the amendment to be in order.

Over to the Cornyn alternative:

To counter Feinstein’s amendment, Senate Majority Whip John Cornyn (R-Texas) proposed a measure that would give the attorney general the power to impose a 72-hour delay for individuals on the terror watch list seeking to purchase a gun and it could become a permanent ban if a judge determines there is probable cause during that time window.

Cornyn argued that Feinstein’s amendment was “un-American” and violated individuals’ constitutional rights by potentially preventing someone mistakenly on the terror watch list from purchasing a firearm. Cornyn recalled that the late Sen. Ted Kennedy (D-Mass.) was once put on the terror watch list by mistake and he argued Feinstein’s amendment presupposed “that the federal government is omniscient and all-competent.”

The Cornyn failure was at least a majority, and since you ask, it included three Democrats with fifty-two Republicans. Yes, Sen. Joe Manchin (D-WV) was a yea. The Nays were all Democrat.

Both amendments can be found in this .pdf file - NoFlyFeinsteinCornyn. Search on "Feinstein" or head to p. 65 for one, then "Cornyn" or p. 75 for the other. The gist of the Cornyn proposal is shown as a picture below.

My question - evidently the Republican Senate was behind this, so one presumes the Cornyn amendment meets the due process concerns aired by Messrs. Volokh, Cooke and others. But have they confirmed that?

And a second question - just what are the Democratic objections? Isn't this at least half a loaf, is it too grave an encroachment on law enforcement "privileges", too hopelessly cumbersome, or what?

And I feel obliged to add this NY Times editorial denouncing the no-fly list with passion and conviction in April 2014:

After eight years of confounding litigation and coordinated intransigence, the Justice Department this week grudgingly informed Rahinah Ibrahim, a Malaysian architecture professor, that she was no longer on the federal government’s vastly overbroad no-fly list.

...

How can Dr. Ibrahim be a terrorist and not be a threat at the same time? Welcome to the shadowy, self-contradictory world of American terror watch lists, which operate under a veil of secrecy so thick that it is virtually impossible to pierce it when mistakes are made. A 2007 audit found that more than half of the 71,000 names then on the no-fly list were wrongly included.

In a recently unredacted portion of his January ruling, Judge Alsup noted that in 2009 the government added Dr. Ibrahim back to its central terrorist-screening database under a “secret exception” to its own standard of proof. This would be laughable if it weren’t such a violation of basic rights. A democratic society premised on due process and open courts cannot tolerate such behavior.

It's TimesWorld, so it is hard to psychoanalyze this sort of flip-flop. My guess - they have somehow convinced themselves that the only people on the current no-fly list are creepy Christian white guys like the Planned Parenthood shooter or Dylann Roof of Charleston. If and when they realize that it is a list Donald Trump could endorse because the Americans on the list are (very probably) predominately Muslim, well, stand back as they stand up for a misunderstood minority. Oooh, I can feel their outrage just thinking about it...

The Justice Department will vigorously investigate Obama's former chief of staff to see whether he covered up the Laquan McDonald video to bolster his chances in an election run-off. I love a mystery!

And the mystery here is, how do the Democrats energize their base (i.e., rile up their BLM faction) while managing to protect a powerful Chicago machineoperative with close Obama ties? And can do manage that while presenting some sort of a story that does not involve extra-terrestials and Area 51? Or, can they find a way to delay this mess past next November's elections?

Hey, some earnestly progressive college Presidents have been caught on the wrong side of the current wave. Why can't a mayor be next? My prediction - Rahm Overboard!

As background, the Times ponders this Rubik's Cube:

CHICAGO — The Justice Department plans to begin a far-ranging investigation into the patterns and practices of the Chicago Police Department, part of the continuing fallout over a video released last month showing the police shooting of Laquan McDonald, a person familiar with the case said Sunday.

..

Critics have raised many questions.

Did Mayor Rahm Emanuel’s re-election fight play a role in his administration’s decision this year to pay $5 million to Mr. McDonald’s family members even before they filed a lawsuit? Why did City Hall include a provision in the settlement to keep the video private at least temporarily? And why did it take Anita Alvarez, the Cook County State’s Attorney, 13 months to charge the police officer involved in the shooting? She waited until hours before the city was forced to release the video to charge the officer, Jason Van Dyke, with first-degree murder.

Baffling!

The authorities in Chicago insist there was no cover-up, and on Sunday night a spokesman for Mr. Emanuel said the city welcomed the Justice Department’s decision.

Last week, a spokeswoman for Mr. Emanuel, Kelley Quinn, said, “Any suggestion that politics played a role in this investigation is patently false.” Faced with growing criticism and demands for his resignation, Mr. Emanuel wrote an op-ed column in Chicago’s newspapers over the weekend, calling for broad changes at the police department but also laying out a defense of his own role. “What I strongly reject is the suggestion that the videotape of the McDonald shooting was withheld from the public because of the election,” Mr. Emanuel said.

"Reject"? Doesn't he mean "Acknowledge as obvious"?

More puzzle pieces deepen the mystery:

By February 2015, the lawyers for Mr. McDonald’s mother had obtained the dashboard camera video itself. Michael Robbins, one of the family’s lawyers, said the lawyers had subpoenaed the video as part of a separate probate case. On Feb. 27 they contacted the city, seeking $16 million before they filed any lawsuit.

As it happened, three days earlier, Mr. Emanuel had learned that he was about to face an intense, six-week test of his leadership. He had failed to get the 50 percent plus 1 vote that he needed to win re-election to a second term outright, and was forced into an April 7 runoff with Jesus G. Garcia. Mr. Emanuel’s campaign was especially vulnerable among some black and Latino voters who had been upset by his administration’s closing of nearly 50 public schools as well as policing and crime.

“If that video would have surfaced around that time, he would have lost the whole support of the black, African-American community in Chicago,” said William Calloway, an activist here.

...

After a meeting in mid-March, lawyers for the family and the city reached an agreement to pay the family $5 million. City Council approval was needed, though, and that body’s next meeting was on April 15, eight days after Mr. Emanuel won re-election.

Chicago law department officials said settlements before lawsuits have even been filed are not unprecedented. The speed with which negotiations proceeded, the officials said, reflected the wishes of the lawyers for the other side and the nature of the case.

The city included in their settlement with the McDonald family a provision barring release of the video until criminal investigations were complete. Law department officials said that has been standard practice in Chicago for decades so as not to hinder such investigations. In this case, they said, no one expected the investigations to take much longer. City officials also said the family itself was not eager for the police video to be made public.

Just a series of coincidences that let this all be resolved quietly before the election. One last howler:

Mr. Emanuel himself was aware of the case and the video at the point at which a city settlement was being weighed, city officials said. His office did not respond to questions about when the mayor first learned of the case and the video. He has said he did not watch the video until it was released to the public.

Hmm, maybe Rahm can become Deputy Commissioner of Football and be the guy who is too busy or uninformed to watch videos of controversial cases, like the Ray Rice knockout punch, that Commissioner Goodell is too busy/uninformed to watch.

Let's have a To Be Fair moment - Rahm and his people were smart enough to know they were orchestrating a cover-up, so keeping the video away from Rahm would be certainly be part of the strategy. That preserved his Implausible Deniability, now being exercised.

Of course, we can only wonder why he didn't want to see the video, since as Mayor he is meant to be overseeing the Police Department and the city was about to write a big check for what may or may not have been heinous police misconduct.

So, was Rahm guilty of gross negligence of his oversight responsibilities? Too tired to focus, and unwilling or unable to do his job? Or did he order the Code Red?

Per the speech transcript he clearly says "No-Fly" list. But the WhiteHouse.gov talking points refer to both.

Since Obama and his speechwriters were hazy about the relevant visa program under which a terrorist entered the country (darn these pesky details, when Obama has to fret about climate change in the 22nd century!), perhaps we can be excused for wondering whether they are also confused about this.

The explanation might be simple, although it means this "2,000 people" example is misleading. The No-Fly List is a subset of the broader terror Watchlist, and maybe the available reports cross-checking gun purchase applications doesn't immediately break down No-Fly listers as a separate category. Yes, that means the 2,000 figure may be wildly overstated, but this is Obamaville.

And do let note again the non-barking dog. Surely Team Obama has made an attempt to learn the subsequent criminal history of these people we are watching who are buying guns. I mean, we are watching them, yes?

So how has this history turned out? How many people have we been watching that bought guns and subsequently used them in ghastly crimes? Why isn't the White House trumpeting those examples of coulda-woulda-shoulda "Crimes prevented and lives saved" if this "common-sense" shredding of the Constitution had been adopted years ago?

People looking at it from the other end of the telescope have noted that many recent mass killers (e.g., Adam Lanza of Newton or Dylann Roof of Charleston) were not on a no-fly list and almost certainly would never have been considered for it.

Well. If I were a a trial lawyer I wouldn't ask this question - maybe Team Obama has an impressive list of criminals that moved from the watchlist to jail after buying guns legally and then committing crimes. But they ought to be waving that list in our faces, so their silence is telling.

December 06, 2015

What was the point of Obama's speech? His first two proposals, to ban gun sales to no-fly listers and ban assault weapons, are dead even before arrival. Visa review and reform? File that under "What's taken so long?"

And let's spend a moment on dogs that have not barked. Obama and his staffers surely would let us know if any past mass killers had purchased weapons legally while on the terrorist watch list. Either they have missed a blindingly obvious talking point, or the watch list has yet to yield that kind of poisoned fruit. Their silence is deafening.

And is anyone taking reassurance from Obama's promise to deliver more of the same old same old by the coalition of Alphonse and Gaston, each politely waiting for the other to commit ground troops first? His speechwriters were evidently taken by the poetry of "Since the Paris attacks we have" because that phrase preceded more bomb strikes, more training, more this and more that. Again we were left wondering - did this coalition really only decide to take ISIS seriously after the Paris attacks? What would it take to get Obama to turn the dial past six and all the way to eleven?

One more year of this.

To be fair, the Times had access to Team Obama spinmeisters, so we are offered this:

The president’s speech was not intended to announce a shift in strategy, or new policies to combat the terrorist threat at home and overseas. Rather, it was designed to inform Americans of the administration’s continuing efforts, and to urge Americans not to give in to fear.

I am giving in to the fear that our C-in-C is in deeply over his head.

OPPORTUNITY LOST: From the Times coverage:

He added, “The threat from terrorism is real, but we will overcome it.”

Had he but said "The threat is real and its spectacular". No such luck.

The feelings of entitlement behind so many mass shootings may explain why shooters skew not just male but white male.

Gee, I understood there would be no math. White shooters, roughly two/thirds of the total mass shooters, skew white in a country that is two-thirds non-Hispanic white (Fine, 63.7%; sampling margin of error). Do tell.

SINCE YOU ASK: If forced to defend the "skews white" claim, one might argue that among conventional homicide offenders the number of black and white is roughly equal. Therefore, relative to their presence in conventional homicide statistics, whites are over-represented among mass killers. And yes, I would pay extra to watch a progressive advance the argument that the appropriate baseline would be to expect an over-representation of blacks and Hispanics in the mass killer statistics.

ERRATA: A proportion of non-Hispanic whites by age cohort could be gleaned from this table, but it is still around two/thirds.